Winning and weakness

First, this was written about 1500 years ago. Amazing. Put this guy in a pulpit today.

Second, we have the rare occasion to hear from Hannah's song on the coming Sunday. To someone raised on Mary's magnificat, Hannah's musical number feels rougher, closer to the guts, with less care for poetics and more presence of viscera.

Hannah suggests something to us that, while a perfectly common lesson in Scripture, is one that we continue to ignore on almost every level. "Not by might does one prevail."

Such a simple sentiment. Notice that it is not the opposite of 'might makes right.' Instead, Hannah is claiming that one simply does not succeed by might. Might doesn't win things. It's not the strength of the arm or military of bank account that allows a person to prevail. I find myself wondering: do any of us actually believe this? Do I believe this, on any level? And notice, too, that Hannah doesn't claim that this is an ideal that we should strive for--she claims it as fact.

I can think of at least three different ways we could understand this statement.

1. The Sun and the North Wind. If you don't know this story: This particular folk tale relates how the two place a bet on who can get a guy to lose his winter coat faster. The strong North Wind tries to blow it off him, but the guy just holds the jacket tighter and tighter. The sun just relaxes and opens up, and it warms up, so the guy takes the jacket off.

Not by might does the wind prevail, but simply by letting go does the sun win. Might doesn't prevail because the very process of forcing something raises everyone else's forcing, and all the forces prevent anyone from moving. Relaxing, as does the sun, opens up new worlds and possibilities by letting us all relax.

2. The Tao Te Ching. Here, we are commended to hold to the weaker because it wins us the stronger. Without wandering here endlessly in Chinese metaphysics, here is a short summary of how the Tao imagines that might does not prevail. It is, says the Tao, that someone submits that creates the possibility of any kind of contest at all. If I punch my dog, I can do that only if my dog is there to be punched, treats the punch as a punch, and so on. Literally, with no dog, I don't get to feel like a dog-puncher. My dog creates the possibility of my being a superior feeling dog-puncher. By submitting to the punching, my dog enables my feeling strong, victorious.

Something similar happens when Christ invites us to turn the other cheek. If we punch back when we are hit, we have fulfilled all the rules for the creation of a fight, a violent contest where the fighter wins. If we turn the other check, something that looks like weakness, we reconstitute the whole situation by the very definition of how we behave. By weakly submitting to being hit, but then inviting a second, we have made it clear that it is only at our invitation that the situation exists. The suggestion seems to be that victimhood is undone not by becoming a victimizer but by undoing the system by acknowledging our complicity in it and changing it.

3. The weak win because they leave room for God's action. The strong prove so blind to God's action because of the reliance they develop on their own strength, but because the weak always turn to God--having no other choice--they find victory.

So, do the weak win in our society? I still, I think, have a hard time believing that. But perhaps Hannah's point is a deeper one. When we live in a society of violence, of victimization, of force, then nobody wins. It's only the weak that invite God's presence in, which is the only thing that just might save the weak, just might save me. Only by changing the game does anyone win.

Newcomers

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17

That Ruth. So unbelievably daring.

It's fantastic how this story never grows old, this simple of story of a foreigner who worms her way into the heart of a culture and the genealogy of a king. Her virtue is her faithfulness, her courage is her sexual indiscretion, and her secret weapon is friendship. Her story undercuts easy theology about welcoming 'the other.' It demands that we recognize the respect, love, and joining to the other that our very own system of justice and our very own systematic theologies require.

And the story we hear this week is that great climax on the old sinful threshing floor. A parishioner of mine recently told me that she can't read the story of Ruth without hearing the Reba song, Fancy. A woman with one shot at a better life relying on her sexual wiles, uncovered feet and the threshing floor in the Hebrew and "men with their pants off" and "very heavy drinking" in more accurate English.

Of course, it's more than that. Ruth's story is also that of a pair of women on the fringe of society, risking starvation, who are willing to challenge the patriarchy to receive what should have been Naomi's by right. Score one against the masculine hegemony.

And of course, it's more than that. Ruth's story is about friendship and dedication and faithfulness, with a fidelity that extends from God through its characters and into Ruth, Boaz, and Naomi, and through them, God's fidelity extends through David, and into Israel, and into the whole world.

But here's what I keep thinking: is Ruth's example really what I expect newcomers at my church to do in order to join? Are they really going to be faithful past reason, seduce our men, and then stay and form happy lives here with bad coffee and powdered creamer?

I'm wondering if Ruth, in its outline rather than its details, is the lie we tell ourselves about evangelism. I'm wondering if we all hope new people, perfect in their faith and dedicated beyond reason, will show up and wait for us to get things right. I wonder if we keep hoping the other will show up and knock us down with their beauty, and then set us back on the right path so that we'll grow and finally become generous to those in need and defend of the outcasts of society.

It seems to me that is subconsciously what we hope. How much easier it would be to have Ruth show up at our door rather than the endless bitchy church shoppers! How much easier it would be to have Ruth at our door than the great absence of people who fear the religious because they have lost all sense of its meaning, importance, and message.

So, perhaps, rather than admiring Ruth from a friendly and hopeful distance, we are called to be Ruth. We are called to be faithful in a foreign land that is America, a land that only sometimes lives up to its notions of justice and caring for widows and orphans. We are called to be courageous in a land with our flagrant indiscretions of passion, our attempts to love people whether they deserve it or not. We are called to be the newcomer showing up at people's doors, inviting them to live up to the full possibility of our shared humanity in their own context.

Perhaps, God calls us not to hope people come to our party, but to show up at the parties of others and encourage them to see that a fullness of party cares for the least of our world.

Concrete cities

Revelation 21:1-6a

A new heaven, and a new earth. A place with even the sea, that old undrinkable saltwater symbol for chaos, finally gone. A new city, a City even, sans sadness.

I think it would be incorrect to say that this vision is the Christian hope. The Christian hope is something more like 'living forever in God's love.' But this is its visualization, a vision and revelation of the Christian hope. If John the Revelator had to imagine what a physical version of this hope must look like, well, he picks this, and the beauty of that city not only characterized the hope of Augustine in his book writing and the Puritans in their founding of their new communities in the Americas, but it's downright catchy to all of us. A world re-made, ended and begun again, a world closer to God's presence, without the chaos, without the death and grief. It doesn't claim there will be no anxiety, but here's hoping.

It's too bad it gets co-opted by some who turn it into the vision of their particular hope and place their own idol at the center, the 'left behinds' of the world. We let them steal it, I think. Not our Christian hope--we keep our hope--but we lose its instantiation, its physicality, and we retreat into the abstract because we let someone else take what John the Revelator so desperately wanted us to have: something concrete to hold onto when chaos is up to the neck, rather than vanished.

I do believe that our best bet is to find some way to re-grab onto the concrete. We all know the usual apophatic warnings, and we all meditate deeply on the many meanings of keeping an idol, but sometimes we do this so much that we give up concrete hope, visible hope, the hope of an actual city. We spend so much time deconstructing various hopes as idolatrous: we take Eusebius and maybe even Acts for their hope in the Roman Empire; we take Rome apart for its authoritarian hope; we take Anglicans apart for their hope in relationship; we take the Enlightenment apart for its hope in Human Progress.

I could easily go one--we deconstruct everything, all notions, revealing their hidden idolatry. And this has often been good for us. The Roman Empire was not the fruition of God's kingdom. Roman Catholic hope in papal authority seems misplaced if not foolish; Anglicans too easily pretend relationship rather than experience its depths; the Enlightenment led naturally to its colonialism, its genocides.

But: we have got to find some concrete hope, people. Without it, we--and I really don't mean academics, I mean everybody--sit on our own piles, afraid to share our private hopes because they, too, get deconstructed. We must have a city, a city of God, something to work toward. Because once we have surrendered our vision, our hope languishes. A hope without a concrete appearance is like desiring to become a pro basketball player without my ever setting foot in a court.

What concrete hopes can we have? How can we support each other in those hopes? I can only think of concrete hope that guides our time that has survived, and it is losing its grip a bit. It was offered by our modern prophet, MLK Jr., who offered his vision, his dream of a city where race had lots its negative power.

If we are going to join in the work for that heavenly city, what, exactly, does it look like to you? And what are we going to do to make space for it?

How should we preach on Job on a Sunday morning? Although many of us love it, we love it because we spent weeks or months struggling with the text, perhaps with the help of an original language and/or academic commentaries. But to condense one of its wisdoms into a single thing, even for a short passage, is daunting. I'm not sure I know how to do it.

But as we hear the climax of Job this Sunday, with the terrible/wonderful ambiguity about being dust and ashes (the Hebrew makes it very ambiguous to what extent Job is recanting his protests, a beautiful ambiguity utterly lost in English), it seems worthy to try. Someone has got to convince us all to spend more time studying Job, and if we can't provide an advertisement on Sunday morning, no one will even know it's there. We'll all be stuck in Luke's gospel forever, with all its Samaritans and prodigals, only because it seems less complicated.

If I were able to offer a single window into Job at its climax, I would suggest this: human experience is inescapably ambiguous. And: God finds this to be no barrier to relationship with us.

By ambiguity, I mean that our experiences can be understood, or read, in different ways. If a word is ambiguous, this means that I could understand it in different ways with different meanings. When my dog injures her back, I can understand that experience in a number of different ways: I can believe it was an accident of the universe, a result of her pride, a result of my carelessness, a work of divine providence, a karmic response, or I can be entirely undecided about it. The ambiguity of our experience means that NOT that we can't decide among possible readings of the world, but that we are always aware of other readings and the possibility that they, rather than our own reading, are more truthful.

Although the ambiguity of human experience is part of all of our lives, it is not easily preach-able. After all, who wants to point to someone in a hospital bed: "well, maybe God is with you when you suffer, or maybe not--you could understand the situation either way." We hate to point that out, even if that's the feeling of the one in the bed.

But this is the heart of Job, the experience of a suffering human who demands to know why he must suffer. And God's reply is a difficult one: God seems to reply that the answer is outside Job's understanding. The theological move offered here is so unusual it's almost difficult to understand the full breadth of it: suffering is ascribed not to Providence in a world of sin, not as part of a Process of becoming, not as a result of chaos in a free will world. God replies that Job can't understand the answer by bringing up all kinds of things Job isn't prepared to understand, comprehend, know, or even apprehend. The whole book of Job is, to be anachronistic for a moment, like a long reflection on the idea that Paul mentions when he talks about 'seeing through a glass darkly,' where things appear dim, unknown, perhaps this or perhaps that.

The question of suffering in the book of Job remains unanswered because humans can't understand it. If I were to wax philosophical a moment, suffering is "pain we feel at our own limitation." If suffering stems in part from our human limitation, this limitation again asserts itself in seeking an answer--our understanding simply isn't big enough, and it can't even be made big enough. Jesus, the perfect human, feels pain at his own limitation on the cross and thus suffers. Not even Jesus in his humanity understood why the universe is constructed precisely this way--put crudely, his brain was not big enough. This is perhaps a radical idea for us, because we humans these days seem to think that nothing is ultimately beyond our understanding, given enough time and experimentation. But, says the book of Job, that's just wrong. Our limitations are precisely that: limitations.

And then, God turns right around and affirms Job's decision to push the question. Apparently, God doesn't care that humans try to reach beyond themselves, so long as it's toward relationship with God. Even if they reach out in anger, in frustration, in a lawsuit (which is the language both Job and God use), God doesn't seem to mind. He answers Job's complaint, and in the cryptic end to the story, Job finds healing. Not, we might add, restored--his children are still dead, and he will likely never forget these years of pain. But nonetheless, he finds healing, a way to move forward, a restored relationship with God. Indeed, Job has developed a relationship with God precisely by recognizing and accepting that he does not understand God.

I am reminded of a graduation speech at a college offered by Tom Brokaw some years ago, a snippet of which I caught while pausing in a truck stop. He said, and I quote from memory, "I bring you bad news today. Real life is not like college. Real life is not like high school. In fact, real life is like junior high." Why junior high? Because it's awkward, certainly. But to build on Brokaw's point in a theological manner: in junior high, things are ambiguous. Are we adults, or children? Are we popular, or unpopular, or beyond popularity? Are we sexual, or not? The answer is that it depends, that it is ambiguous.

And real life is like junior high. Real life with God is ambiguous, not one string of certainties and good feelings. Real life with God is awkward, halting. In real life with God, like in junior high, we both want to pretend we understand everything, and in fact have many things that are simply beyond our understanding.

So: good old, difficult Job. Maybe too true for us, some days.

A pause for Anglican politics

Just a brief thought or two on ongoing Anglican developments--more preaching thoughts hopefully to come:

Rowan Williams' statement is most assuredly worthy of your time, should you be interested in the torturous (and tortured) intrigue of sex and politics in the Anglican Communion.

The problem, to me, seems to fall into two simple parts. Or, perhaps what has really happened is that nothing about this has become simpler, but in having sat through this tense business for years now, the emotions no longer burn quite so much.

1. Many of us have become increasingly convinced, by (what we believe to be) sound theology, experience of human persons, prayer, and the Holy Spirit's presence, that gay marriage--following the usual vows and callings we associate with straight marriage--is something that God is calling us to embrace. Fidelity requires no specific genitalia. God's love can be shown, likely even in a sacramental way, through married persons of the same sex.

2. Others disagree that, in fact, God has called us to this. More likely, we have been deceived--perhaps by culture, perhaps by our pride. But marriage can never happen between two people of the same genitalia because this can never show whatever marriage is supposed to show about God's love and intention for the world.

Of course, we from (1) think those from (2) are deceived by culture or pride. Those from (2) believe (1) is not recognizable as the church, the ecclesia, the body of people following Christ, because we are changing historical sacramental teaching. We, in (1), believe that we're following ancient sacramental teaching in Spirit. And on down the spiral.

And there you have it. Our impasse. We disagree not only about whether two people of similar genitalia can accomplish God's purpose in marriage, but also about how we make that kind of decision.

The Archbishop seems to point the way ahead by suggesting a kind of two-tier communion in an Anglican Covenant. I'm not wild about the covenant--it smells too confessional to me--but if this is where the wind blows, I say: fine. I am quite certain I have never been a first tier Christian, so being a second tier Christian bothers me not at all. And historically, we American Anglicans have been second-tier before. It was not so long ago that England wouldn't introduce the episcopate to our apostate republic--Scotland, it turned out, who was groaning under its own second-tier status, created a kind of solidarity among second-tier Anglicans and got us rolling in the Episcopal line.

So, I'm fine being second tier. Or "track." Or however the inferior branch is named. I was never picked first at kickball out on the playground, either, and I discovered that it didn't kill me.

The problem is, for us, a surprisingly simple one. Either quit supporting the ministry that comes from gay clergy and gay couples, or quit supporting people we love in theory but mostly never see in other countries around the world. And remember, this is being asked of some us, like me, who grew up and have spent our whole lives recognizing the holiness that characterizes faithful same-sex relationships.

It bears mentioning that most of the people who have left the Episcopal church were the most dysfunctional assholes around, who filled meetings with hatred and fear, and who would always put their own agenda above any communal mission or prayer. So, we find ourselves faced with painful questions.

What would happen if we suddenly discarded our whole spiritual learning and wisdom about the possible blessing in faithful same-sex couples? Do we have to be like those people who left? Would they then call the shots for our future? Would we give up the relationships with the clergy and gay people who raised us, who were the very first people to teach us about Christ? Would they become our "second-tier" friends?

I'm not cynical about our world-wide communion, but I am realistic. We will never pick our preachy Neighbor whom we never see in person over the persecuted Neighbor we see every day. It simply won't happen, not because we're bad people, but because we're trying to do what we believe God is calling us to do. If others think we're not hearing God right, that's okay by me. I think they're not hearing the call right, either.

And for a change, we Americans don't hold the power. Perhaps it will be best for us to keep discernment, but surrender our status.

So, make me a second-tier Anglican, give me a shallower relationship with our provinces, and announce to the world that I've selfishly chosen local discernment over the global when I believed so strongly that the global discernment was wrong. I'm ready, and I write this entirely without malice or sarcasm.

I've still got prayer, teaching, and evangelism to do, I've got to grow up into the full stature of Christ, I've got worldwide mission to support with my body and my money (that I won't stop no matter the tier in which I'm put), and if that means I don't get picked first for kickball, that's fine by me. God is working more in us than we can ask or imagine--even those of us in second tier.

Another David and Goliath Story

1 Samuel

This is such an abused story. It's also so good I can't imagine people would pass it up.

Abused, because it's used in every context where something small beats something big. If the underdog wins in a law case, it's a "David and Goliath" story." If my poodle overcomes your Rottweiler, it's a David-Goliath story. If my pinto out drag races your muscle car--David-Goliath. But in the story itself, David makes it pretty damn clear why the story is important. David says: Guns don't kill people--God kills people. And so carrying guns, or really big spears and swords and being, if you'll pardon the expression, a "huge mother-fucker," is no help is God intervenes. God likes small people, so if you think you're big, watch out--that tiny dude has got a really big friend. So the story gets misused. It's not actually about small people. It's about their Big Friend.

Perhaps its entertaining quality is self-explanatory.

How we're supposed to make sense of this story in modern warfare is something of a mystery to me, in significant part because God seems to be advocating for refugees more these days than ensuring, say, the victory of one side over another in the Congo. And, disturbingly, Afghanistan vs. the US does not, in point of fact, make the US David. Quite the opposite. Should God choose to intervene, we're going to have our head sawed off by a little man, much to our embarrassment and the consternation of our friends.

And that leads me to what this story makes me wonder this week: how exactly do we get God on our side? That's the question this story should make us want to ask. Not: where's the nearest Goliath, I love hamburgers and ass-kicking, and I'm all out of hamburgers. But: how can we get a piece of that slingshot action?

And the answer is a real challenge. David didn't entice God to his side. God picked David. God may be a Big Friend to the small, but God seems to determine God's own involvement. We can't get a piece of that slingshot action--not by asking, not by begging, not by believing that our cause is truly righteous. Most righteous causes in Scripture suffer, get kicked down, carried into Exile, or crucified. God triumphs for the righteous, but not in the David-Goliath way. God seems to expect the righteous to be a bit more long-suffering.

No, the truly graceful thing about the David-Goliath story is that it has nothing to do with David. It has to do with saving lives, with protecting people from mercenaries, with defending God's people. But David can't call upon that--God called him, had Samuel dump a few cups of oil on his head to prove it.

So as we carry out into our daily life, we learn to lessons here. 1. Don't fight small men with oil dripping from their head. And 2. God is still an active force in the world, defending those Kingdom of God places that may be too small to see. It's tempting to become lost in the details of violence and warfare, in the politics of our age, and to believe that god has given up entirely on being involved in history. But the David and Goliath story reminds us: God is still at work in our lives, in this world, and in history, even if we can't see it--and frankly, we probably shouldn't bet against Her.

Deep and Wide, there's a foundtain flowing deep and wide

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13


So God sees not as mortals do, but instead into the heart. Because of this sight, David will make the next best king, says God, and God has Samuel anoint David. He becomes "Messiah," which just means 'the anointed one.'--which is at best a tenuous kind of political existence, given that Saul is not only still alive and kicking (and clinically depressed and homicidal) but also holds still holds the throne. I think there's supposed to be a little Christian metaphor in there somewhere. Jesus becomes the Messiah and departs into heaven but will return to displace the king of this world and become its rightful king--just like David eventually flees to work outside Israel with the Philistines, but one day will return to his rightful throne, the one to which he's been anointed.

But I'm more interested in this seeing business which God seems to be better at. I feel like the typical reading of this passage runs something like this: we all only see the skin of people, whether they're pretty or not, and therefore we are materialists, falling short of God's calling to us. We should, instead, learn to look into the heart of people and see who they truly are. I think this is wrong.

We are not materialists, not as Americans in the West. We just ain't. Materialism comes in many forms, all with their nuances, like: a. materialism means that only the the 'stuff' of a thing matters, never any external form; b. materialism means that only the tangible realm exits; or c. only the tangible realm is knowable. But we're not materialists--those folks are thoughtful, devoted, and perhaps mistaken, but that ain't us. If we were materialists, we would all recycle. If we were materialists, we would fix our cars rather than buy new ones. If we were materialists in the West, we would actually CARE for all this material we throw away.

No, we're not materialists--we're shallow. We don't even care to answer the question of whether only the material world exists. We're just too lazy and shallow to bother with that, and so we sorta roughly accept that maybe what we can see is what we got. We have plastic surgery not because we believe our material bodies are all that matter, but because we are fearful that our society won't like the way our body looks. We want to maximize (or minimize, depending on the body part and our cultural background) various body parts simply so that life is more of what we desire--we are too shallow to ask if we are, in fact, desiring the wrong thing.

So, if this Old Testament lesson indicts us, it is not because we are too materialistic. It is because we are too shallow to take even materialism seriously. Thus, if God sees not like we do, that means that God sees depth.

If God sees the heart, this does not mean that God sees our absolute reality at our center--I'm not even sure that that kind of 'essentialist' (meaning all things have an essential essence) is Hebrew, much less Christian. Although I do stand in the minority view there. But the Hebrew word for 'heart' there means more like the place from where intentions arise, or the place where decision are made, or the place where dedication is played out. It is a decision organ, not an essential quality about us.

So when God looks, God sees not like we do with our lazy, shallow gaze that considers only what we want from what we see. God sees our innermost thoughts, the possibilities of who we might become. Or perhaps even better: God sees not only our immediate desires, but the greatest desires from which our immediate ones spring. And God is not afraid to judge those desires--this one will make a good king, this one won't.

What we lack is depth. We'll use any excuse to run from it. Investigating our own hearts and desires is too much work, or its too intellectual, or its too earthy and practical, we say. Or: God only wants obedience, not understanding; or, it was good enough for my forebears, it's good enough for me. We have reasons within reasons for refusing to go deeply into anything, much less ourselves or our neighbor or God, all of which would change us and lead us to the other two.

What I hear in this lesson is not only that God disdains our shallow vision, but I hear even more an indictment of our shallow age, an age that has provided us with so much fodder to feed our fleeing from depth. It is no accident so few can sit in silence for longer than ten, or even five, minutes without pain. It is no accident that many sleep with the television on, having watched it at every free moment. It is no accident that we no longer feel comfortable with terms like liberal and conservative--even our old political markers have been sucked dry of the intricacies of their stances, of the thoughtfulness of their histories.

I can't help but remember Alasdair Macintyre, who famously at the end of his book After Virtue claims that we are entering a new Dark Ages where, hopefully, a new kind of monastery will arise to preserve the arts, treasures, and depths of our kind. He claims that we need a new, doubtless very different, St. Benedict. Some folks think he's talking about universities, others about churches, but I increasingly think there is truth in his somewhat apocalyptic prophecy. Without communities of depth, how will we ever learn to see beyond the surface, to learn something about how God sees? And this is not a fatalistic question--many of us have known communities of depth, seen what they can preserve and grow.

And so, I come to the question most in my thoughts these days: how do we foster Deep Places?

Wallflower

Trinity Sunday

Roughly a thousand years ago, the church decided to have one Sunday each year dedicated to the Trinity, and that idea has stuck around. I strongly suspect that very shortly after the holiday was established, it immediately became tradition, one still observed, that the newest priest on the block, the lowest one in the pecking order, was tasked with preaching on Trinity Sunday. Let the new kid explain the Trinity to the unwashed masses.

This is because the Trinity is today, and perhaps was then too, one of the least understood parts of our faith. I don’t know whether any of you has been asked before to explain the Trinity, but it’s a fairly daunting task. And not only is it difficult to understand, it’s really easy to make fun of. I remember very well being in college and going out to see a student written play. Both of my roommates in college were theater majors, and so every weekend we were going to see something or other on campus. But on this particular occasion, crammed into the tiny little blackbox theater, the play was winding through its plot exploring some existential crisis or other. Honestly, every play written by a college student explores some existential crisis or other, and every one involves smoking, self-exploration, and nudity whenever possible. In fact, if you can smoking, self-exploration, and nudity to happen simultaneously, it was generally judged a success.

But on this occasion, someone was doubting their faith and so went to talk to another character, one who was a kind of 'drunk the kool-aid' vacant-eyed Christian. And so the main character starts yelling at him, asking whether he's supposed to believe some shit about a God is Father and Son and a Ghost and also not these things, and on and on. The laughter in the audience was heartfelt. I found myself sighing. Nothing like presenting ideas you disagree with in their least-flattering light to mock them rather than try to understand them. It still makes me sigh.

I think part of the problem is that, for what seem like good reasons, we're all tempted to explain the Trinity on Trinity Sunday. I think is what I would call a "Bad Idea." Not--and here's where I differ with some people--because the Trinity is impossible to understand. Or even because it's weird. But I think the sermon on Trinity Sunday is simply an awful moment to try and have what is a long, theological, historical, and complicated teaching moment. I think that likely anyone, with the time and interest, could in a classroom setting come to understand the main points of the doctrine. It's really not that onerous, despite the idiotic cloud we build around it like it's the highest of all mysteries. God is mysterious--doctrine isn't. It begins, in essence, with the very strange fact that Jesus seemed both to think that he was God and that he was constantly speaking to his "Father," who also seemed to be God. You could start a class with that unusual fact and more or less explore all the possible options and come to see why we ended up with understanding God to be Trinitarian in a profound way. But Sunday morning probably ain't the time.

So, instead, let's take a short sermon idea, one that might be more helpful. Instead of talking about "what" the Trinity is, let's talk about why it matters. Why we care.

And I think the nicest way to begin is probably by looking at a picture. Or go look at it here.

Rublev, Hospitality of Abraham, such and so on. It's real famous. You all probably know more about it than I do--icons are certainly not my area of expertise.

But I want to point out only one thing--stolen boldly from Rowan Williams--that might change how we think about Trinity Sunday. I've heard it elsewhere, but Williams, as per usual, explains it better than anyone else. So I think it changes things, or at least, it does for me.

If we look at the center character, it's probably Christ. Deacon's stole, hand in the 'teaching pose' above a chalice, blue for divinity and red for something other--humanity or blood or some such. If we look at Christ, we see that Christ is looking at God the Father on our left--God's blue divinity almost entirely shrouded in a mysterious robe. But then if we look at the Father's eyes, we see the Father looking at the figure on the right, the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit is looking at Christ, mimicking him in postures, in blue clothing and dressing, in the inclination of the head.

In the icon, we can't just look at the Trinity. We get drawn into it--seeing Christ and moving with Christ into the mystery of Father, who pushes us on to the Holy Spirit, whose imitation of Christ brings us back to the Word. It's a simple motion, in a way. And it draws us inward, and as many are quick to say, we find ourselves at this table as well--the perspective of the icon is such that we are sitting at the fourth seat, at the table with these three figures, drawn into the circling gaze. This can be hard to see when it's small. I once had the good luck to see a more than lifesize reproduction of this particular icon where the figures were larger than me, and it makes a huge difference on the whole 'sitting at the table' thing. If you ever see this thing that big, the forced perspective is hard to miss--it's literally like standing right at that table.

So, what good is the circling gaze? It is this: God is not a point in space we look at. God is not mystery we gaze at in the abyss and contemplate. God is not the Prime Mover, the perfect stillness that is the Self-Caused Causer of all causes. God is not the Other, the thing different from us. Or at the very least, not only these things. It turns out that to say "God is one" is a metaphorical statement, just like saying "God is great," or talking about "God's arm being strong to save."

Instead, God is more than one. We do not experience God as a separate point, but as a pilgrimage, a drawing up. We meet God in the Word, who calls us into the mystery of the Father, but the mystery in turn breathes us into the active Spirit, whose actions are patterned on Christ. We don't look at God from a distance. We get on the path and walk, or the horse and ride, or the merri-go-round that turns in both a circular fashion and into a new reality. There's a mystic in the tradition who talks about how God is the Non-Aliud, the Not-Other. God is Other from us, but not THE Other--God is not identical with us, but we ourselves cannot pare ourselves down such that God is stripped out of our reality. God is Non-Aliud, Not-Other.

So why Trinity? Because God is not someone we go to visit, or not only. We don't meet God in a consumerist sense, buying and consuming God to meet some need. God's NOT even like the ultra product, some thing that we could consume forever in our never-ending hunger because God is 'infinite.' Instead, God is a Way, a path, a Reality, that we experience and dance with. Knowing God, loving God, requires participation.

So on Trinity Sunday, we remember that faith is a dance in which we share, not a TV show we watch. If we're only watching, we simply haven't met God. If we want to know God, we gotta buck up sometime, fellow wallflowers, and get out on the floor.

Bad Preaching Made Good

Pentecost


As I was exiting a meeting this last week with a group of folks, one person turned to me and said: "so, I know I've been a Christian for twenty-odd years. What is Pentecost again?"

I whipped up a quick answer to what is not a short question--something about undoing Babel. I suppose I could have spoke as well of the Advocate, a kind of lobbyist we have looking out for us in the fabric of reality. Or maybe I could have spoken about the teaching function of the Holy Spirit, how we are promised to continue to learn new things even after Jesus is gone. Or maybe about how Christ's Spirit is still with us, how the church is God the Holy Spirit's dwelling place. And on and on--there are many, many things I could have said.

It reminded me of a problem that arises for me often when I'm preaching, and I think it's probably a problem all share. Here's how I think of it: should we preach Christianity 101, or Christianity 201?

In our faith, there are different layers of questions as people grow in faith. There are the 101 type questions: whether God loves us and how we can experience that love, what forgiveness means, what it means to have gifts and a ministry, and many more. And there are 201 type questions, and these simply reflect deeper on these same questions as people have lived with them a while. How is God's love present in a society with poor healthcare? Not only what does forgiveness mean, but how is reconciliation different? Not only having gifts and ministries, but how do those turn into a vocation?

There's nothing wrong with either type. It has to do with how long we've walked this pilgrimage, and sometimes, a longer walker is delighted to remember some 101 type lessons, and someone who is just beginning can be transformed by far more mature conversations of faith.

But our communities are made up of both types of folks, and 101ers are sometimes lost when they hear 201 preaching, and 201ers can be bored by hashing old ground that truly doesn't speak to the places they've come.

For what it's worth, if you find this kind of division among Christians offensive, both Paul and John seem to take for granted that this division exists. But as I say, there's nothing wrong being early on a pilgrimage or late, but as the preacher, it's a real pain in the ass sometimes to know where we can reach people. BECAUSE, although people seem for odd reasons to doubt this, we preachers want to reach people.

So: how do we know? Is it back to basics, or continuing development? Jesus didn't seem to know. He certainly screws up a similar situation with the Syro-Phoenician woman, thinking he should be 101 when in fact she was way, way down the journey of faith and needed to hear some 201. If Jesus didn't know his audience, so much so that he changes horses in mid-stream, it seems likely that we'll fail to know our audience sometimes, too.

What I wonder, though, is if the Holy Spirit isn't at least as active in those bad sermons. Certainly, even while Christ was stuttering apologetically to the Syro-Phoenician woman, the Spirit was active in telling that challenging story to us. In other words, what looked like failure to Jesus looks like success to us.

I think that the true good news of Pentecost, the true hope at its heart, is revealed in this hope that the Spirit is in bad sermons. The message at Pentecost is that the Holy Spirit can speak good news in any language, any context. Maybe all of our worst sermons, all of our worst ideas, all of our misguided notions of how ought to live--maybe all of these are truly, utterly bad. But because they are so bad, they can be put to good use, become part of a longer preaching of the gospel to an audience we know only dimly.

The gospel at Pentecost is that, perhaps, even bad preaching can become good.

Let's flip for it

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

First, in full disclosure, I feel I should be honest enough to say that I'm very tired of these John readings. I like that gospel, I really do, but this endless lingering over abiding and love and abiding and love and abiding and . . . I just don't find it interesting at the moment. Or perhaps, I found it interesting four weeks ago, the first time we heard it. I would say this doesn't feel like a great lectionary decision: eliminate the Old Testament lesson, and read very slowly the twisting and repetitive rhetoric of John for the whole of Easter.

But, onward to an active idea.

The book of Acts is wacky generally, and this is true for many reasons. Jesus fades out, and Paul becomes the main hero. Everyone thinks that the Roman Empire and civilization will embrace the coming reign of God. Bowels fall out of people. It's a wacky book.

This story is wacky specifically. Imagine: we all get together, you and me and a hundred of our closest friends. We were inspired to start a whole new movement by the life and death of our friend. We used to have a kind of executive board who oversaw the functioning of our group, and with the exit of our friend into the clouds--an awkward moment, that--perhaps we might even say our CEO levitated away. At any rate, the executive board has a vacancy. So, all of us shareholders get together at someone's house--let's say, Joseph of Arimathea's house, because at least it was big--and we talk about who should be elected to the executive board. We don't want to replace the CEO--in fact, we all have this fascinating idea that there will be some kind of oversight from the heavens, and the "spirit" of that CEO will still govern the organization until its fulfilled its mission statement.

But there is a vacancy on the board because on of its members, well, no nice way to put it, went all "Enron" on the organization. Misappropriation of funds, or so John accused him, but the bigger problem came with his defecting from the organization so someone else could buy us out, handing over his shares. This act was apparently so evil that his bowels simply fell out of him and onto the ground, thereby killing him, apparently symbolizing how his body couldn't even take that kind of evil anymore. Some people think their shit don't stink, and others have shit so stinky it just explodes from their abdomen. Totally biblical.

So, to fill that empty post, we decide we'll pick some qualified people, which makes sense. We interview, we listen, we talk amongst ourselves, and we all pretty much agree that we have two leading candidates: Joseph and Matthias. So, how should we choose between them? I know: let's pray, and then flip a coin!

Who would actually do that? Our early church leaders did.

It sounds totally nuts. We don't flip for members of executive boards, or CEOs, or leaders of armies, or presidents. We flip to see who rides shotgun, or who has to be designated driver, or who has to take the dog out. Maybe, best two outta three. But for important things? Definitely not. At the least we'd have them arm wrestle, so maybe the strong one would get it. But nope--they just flip for it, trusting that God will be at work in the random chance of what lot is drawn.

There is a history, here. Ancient Israel used to use the urim and thummim to determine what God wanted--those being fancy names, as far as we can tell, for drawing lots, or flipping a coin, or throwing chicken neck bones on the ground to see what shape they make, or reading tea leaves. We're not exactly sure how it worked--lengths of sticks and lots, or some such. But the priests of ancient Israel took it very seriously. As seriously as the Roman pagans took their bird entrails as speaking of what the gods wanted.

So, they didn't just make this up as a deliberative process. But would we choose a leader this way? Should we? Some Christian denominations still do.

But I think what we might draw from this lesson is something else instead. We don't use the Bible for its geography--we've gotten better at drawing maps, and parts of the Bible were written by people who cared more about names and symbols than cartography. For the same reason, we shouldn't use it for choosing leadership--at least, not directly importing the methods they used for ours.

Instead, perhaps, we should notice the truly wacky thing about this lesson: these people took God seriously. Very seriously. So much so, that they knew that their choices and preferences only mattered so much. God was a working force for them, one who could determine who should be leader.

It's interesting: they take God so seriously that they know that God must be at the heart of what they do. But, on the other hand, they don't expect God to do it for them. They could have waited for God to fix things for them. Instead, they steer a narrow course: God is the reason for the organization's existence, and nothing can happen outside of that. And: God is not expected to do all the work.

What I'd emphasize briefly here that at its beginning, the church remembered something that, two millenia later, we've found it easy to forget. God is the beginning, middle, and end of our work. Nothing we choose, no leader we pick, no snacks chosen for coffee hour, no hymn sung, no ministry engage in, is separate from God. We, being humans, tend to forget that. These people in Acts did not. They built it into the fabric of their first leadership choice.

God is not ancillary to our work. God is not the optional piece at the end. God is not part of the original mission statement. In discerning our leadership, in discerning our direction, we have no agenda but a spiritual one: how can we witness to God's redeeming work in the world? Or, even shorter: how can we witness to God?

Our call is not to create and join church communities that build gyms, or invent answers to hard questions, or encourage us to watch Fox news, or include the wealthiest people in town, or anything like that. Our call is to create communities that both work to tell of God's work in the world and deepen that relationship with God, and we can do this in any way that reflects where God found us: our culture, our location, our language, our politics.

Maybe we shouldn't flip for leadership, but we sure could learn from our ancestor's determination to know who we were serving at every moment.

1st John Is For Lovers

1 John 5:1-6


The NIB commentary this week on this text makes the very novel point that, not only does God love us, but we are called to love God. It probably shouldn't sound like a novel point. But it does. The commentary then takes this point in not very interesting (at least, to me) directions, but I'd like to reflect here on this same idea. We are called to love God (because God loved us first, etc etc).

What does it mean "to love" God? Christian sermons often turn on the loose-goosey connotations of the word 'love' in English, Greek, Hebrew, or Esperanto, for that matter. Love is a fishy thing, squirming this way and that when taken out of its water. It's hard enough to know what we're talking about when we say "God" without throwing what is perhaps the only concept in human interaction that is more ambiguous. What is love? Is it the feeling of stomach dropping? Is it the careful humility of seeing something bigger and more beautiful than ourselves? Is it record-skipping lust, that tears our gaze to look backward down the street? Is it obedient devotion? Is it sibling friendship? Is it some cycle among these things? Is it a verb? A state of being? Is it a goal we work for? Do we fall into it, or does it grow up gradually?

1st John is not especially helpful on this point, either. It walks the obedience line--which is perfectly charming, and I understand why it sounds good. It has the ring of self-sacrifice, the connection to another being, and a sense of radical dependence. But it just doesn't sound like love. I suspect this is because of my upbringing. I had enough experiences with unhealthy adults as a child to know that disobeying them was sometimes the only way to love. To obey, sometimes, is more certainly not to love. If the situation is different with God--because God is always healthy, I suppose--then it is no less confusing, as at least unhealthy adults had the good care to say things to my face for my agreement or dis-. I'm always discerning God's will, never sure if I got it quite right. If obedience alone were love of God, I am inclined to think that surely God would have been more explicit in giving us commandments. "Eat more beef." "Don't throw rocks." That sort of thing.

No, loving God must somehow look a little different. The love of "sleeping beauty" doesn't seem likely to me, either. The feeling of adoration--which I think is most nearly akin to the feeling of being a junior high boy brought out to dance with a beautiful girl for the first time--also strikes me as somehow inadequate. I'm probably a piss poor contemplative for saying that, but it's true. Being lost in an Other in joy is perfectly delightful, and perhaps it is the end of all prayer and likely all art, but if God wanted this alone, God would have been better off making us all flowers. We could stand tall and pretty and praise God's name the whole of our lives, surrendering our anxiety of death and praising while we had strength. But we're not flowers, or at least, not only.

So, although I think obedience and adoration have something to do with loving God, I suppose I have a difference sense of that love. Perhaps it will seem more complicated. To me, it makes more sense.

I think that loving God looks most like this: If "Hope" means that we have a particular vision we desire, and "Faith" means trust in God to work things out for the best, then Hope and Faith are opposites. Hope means we want something to the exclusion of other things, and Faith means we'll accept whatever comes. Love, I think, which strangely mixes hope and faith together, believes Hope and Faith are not opposites, but the same. Love means that somehow both what we desire above all else, and our great willingness to accept whatever comes, are the same thing--even though that should be impossible. Without love, we are all frustrated visionaries or trusting complacents. Love alone connects our hopeful desires and trusting faith. To love means to reach beyond ourselves in desire without lying to ourselves about our finitude. "True love" is, I think, redundant. Love is necessarily true--combining the reality of our limited nature with its stretching beyond.

In other words, if you ask me, I think that to love God is to walk a mobius strip that is at moments obedience (the manifestation of hope), and at moments adoration (the manifestation of trust). Loving God is always one thing or another, but never is merely one thing or another. To love God is to enact that desire and obedience, vision and acceptance, are the same parts of one story.

I think this is why I have trouble preaching about how to love God. I find it to be a far more complicated conversation than most anyone will allow on a Sunday morning.

Ivy

John 15:1-8

Late thoughts on this Sunday.

I have always been interested in the way that we think about things influences/determines/limits/expands/improves/denigrates decisions that we can make. Our imaginative horizons and, even more especially, our metaphors are boundlessly influential in the way that we approach things.

One great example of this comes from the second story in a handy This American Life episode, where it talks about dinosaurs. When you see a dinosaur exhibit, we tend to think that we sit at the cutting edge of science. And yet, dinosaur exhibits more or less reflect the way we think, our metaphors for them, not the way they were. Once museums had their own plastic copies of dinosaur bones, they could arrange them any way they wanted. So, starting in the 1950s, dinosaurs were posed together in scenes of epic combat. It didn't matter who was from what era in history, whether they'd been alive at the same time or not, but they were arranged to gain maximum effect from paying customers. Big dinosaurs were popular--T-Rex, and the like.

In the 1980s, the focus grew to be about the personal prowess of the dinosaurs. If we went to an exhibit, we'd see them lauded for the swift, merciless learning and intelligence. At the same time our culture became crazy about capitalism, the visions we had cutthroat CEOs and their money-making, their adaptability and their predatory instinct, we began to arrange our dinosaurs so put the focus on the dinosaurs we imagined in this way. Think Jurassic Park, either the book or the Steven Spielberg movie. Velociraptors are the star of the show. T-Rex has become a side-show.

By the 1990s, a new metaphor for dinosaurs appeared, one you'll still mostly see if you go to a museum. Now, the emphasis is on the ecosystem, putting all the fossils with other fossils from the era, showing how dinosaurs raised their young, talking about the ecosystem they were all part of.

In short, our metaphors of dinosaurs have determined far more about how we have arranged them, understood them, than anything about the actual dinosaurs themselves.

So, I'd like to focus briefly on our lesson in John, where Jesus gives us an image, a new metaphor for thinking about our communities.

We're all so stuck on Paul, who tells us that our metaphor for the church is a human body. It's a fine metaphor--someone gets to be the eye, we all know people we are pretty sure are the assholes. We all have different parts to play, and we altogether make up the body.

But the metaphor Jesus offers in this gospel is quite different. God is the gardener, Jesus the true vine, and we are the branches on the vine. Think, for a minute, about ivy growing on the ground. Think about the way there are numerous branches, altogether, and we can't tell them apart. If you try to pick up one branch of ivy, you pick up the whole thing.

That's the image Jesus is offering of the church. Not a hierarchical body, but billions of branches, all tied into the true root. All are pruned so that the ivy covers only the parts of teh ground that it should. If one part grows separate from the whole, pulled off, it can't put out its own root.

The Pauline image of the body inevitably limits our choices of understanding how we must function as the church. Everyone has gifts, everyone uses them--a fundamental division of labor.

But here, Jesus challenges that notion. In this metaphor for the church, all are fundamentally equal. It's not about whether hands should say to feet "I have no need of you," but rather than in the vine-vision of the church, you can't actually tell the two apart. You and me are both parts, tied into the true vine, pruned, and encouraged to flower in the process of growing fruit. We don't make one large coordinated whole, guided to move in some direction--instead, we grow quickly, full of life, always pushing forward, offering new fruit moving altogether in every which direction. God sorts out the pruning--we just worry about producing new life, staying connected. So, this vine image is not hte image of extensions cords and a plug strip. It's not about being plugged into God.

It's about the web of life weaved together into a new community, tended by God, rooted in Christ.

What does this mean practically? Perhaps we should be less concerned with committees, those default tools for dividing up labor in the Pauline model, and more concerned with whether or not we're producing life. Perhaps we should remember not that we shouldn't chop off a body part, but that we can't chop off a body part. Perhaps, rather than focusing on the jobs we have, we should remember the being we share: in the end, we all bear the same fruit--fruits of love, trust, forgiveness, good humor, and compassion.

Perhaps our metaphors, like those of the dinosaurs, have reflected and reinforced what we already think, and not what we needed to hear. "The holly and the ivy" bear the crown, as the old carol has it, indeed.

Blue, dead, glowing, Jedi

Easter 3

I'm not actually such a Star Wars fan that it should appear twice in this space, but the readings this week cannot help but call to mind the contrivance that appears in that particular Western. At the end of Return of the Jedi, the highest of the elite Jedi order come back in bodily form, but blue, and glowing, and semi-transparent. Probably one of the few incidents of bodily resurrection in film. It's showy, cheezy, and campy. Pretty much like the gospel lesson this week, where Jesus shows up and eats a fish, even though he's already dead, like it's some kind of party trick.

But let's briefly consider the stranger image from John's first letter. After he affirms that we are children of God, or really that we have been made children of God--so we're adopted, as the language traditionally has it--he says something very odd. "Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is."

What we will be has not yet been revealed.

A strange turn of phrase. Normally, when Christians in our era speak of what happens to us in the afterlife, they speak in one of a few categories. In one, they suggest that we become angels, which most of us find enormously dissatisfying because that suggestion gels not at all with any of the ways that angels appear in Scripture. In another, they suggest that we enter a heavenly realm when we die--much like Jesus, under torture, promises to one of the thieves while hanging around on the cross in Luke's gospel. In still another, Christians suggest that we all "sleep in Jesus" (a phrase that comes from one of Paul's followers, the writer of Ephesians or Colossians, I think) until the final judgment, when we all climb six feet up and stand in line until we come before the great Judge.

In all three of versions, angels, insta-judgment, and sleep-till-final-judgment, we pretty much imagine that all of us, at the appropriate time, will become blue, glowing bodies that can walk through walls and eat fish--pretty much exactly like now, but better.

But John here offers another suggestion, one I've never heard popularly defended from Scripture. Perhaps no one uses this passage to talk about the afterlife because it rather boldly proclaims our ignorance, and we (falsely) think that ignorance and ambiguity at the time of someone's death can provide no comfort, and instead we prefer to stick with any explanation that is understandable. Even if we proclaim ignorance, we try to leave Scripture out of it. How surprising that it beats us to the punch.

John believes that we have no idea what we will be. Ever the mystic, he does say that he thinks whatever it is, we'll be able to see God as God is. That strikes me as a little optimistic, but mystics usually lean toward the optimism side of things. But he says that if we have hope in this, it will purify us.

As I watch those around me suffer from cancer, Parkinson's, and the thousand mortal perils that we are subject to, I find myself today siding with John. I like bodily resurrection and the holiness of creation that it naturally implies, but I also understand wanting to be translated into something a bit more robust, something with a bit more vision, something we don't understand yet. Bodies may be resurrected, but I hope Parkinson's isn't. What that looks like, I have no idea--but I can hope.

In John's understanding of Christ's time in the world, Christ held a reality that made ours look like darkness, and Christ has brought us into that lighter reality. That offers us, I think, a unique perspective on a prayer we say at baptism, when we invite the newly baptized to share with us in Christ's "eternal priesthood." We, as members of that brighter reality, are charged as lay priests to carry that light anywhere it can go, to be the connection of the brighter reality of Christ with this dimmer one. Not, as Luke would say, to change the the kingdom of this world into God's. Not, as Matthew would say, that all peoples of the earth might be under one Teacher. But, as John says, simply because we have seen a new light--and although our eyes have not adjusted to it, and we cannot yet see everything it will mean, it has nonetheless brought us life, and life more abundantly, and we are now to be priests between the brightness of God's reality and the darkness of this one.

Perhaps only John invites us so boldly to share in a light that we do not understand but that has brought us to life, anyway--and then to tell everyone about it.

Proliferation of Easter

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Perhaps anyone who has had experience with divorce and a hopeful remarriage gains intuitive purchase into this reading.

Jeremiah pulls upon our memories of broken relationship. That feeling of a covenant gone wrong--infidelity, either of the sexual variety or of the far more common and pernicious varieties, tearing through promises made. Rending people back into disparate elements. Divorce is primarily about paperwork, even in Jeremiah's time, which serves as poor sacrament for what is lost in the end of a relationship, even when divorce was obviously the best solution for everyone involved. All the dreams of that relationship not killed so much as orphaned, left sitting alone outside. Never forgotten, but not visited anymore, languishing away in memory and dream nursing homes, longing for a kind of health that simply cannot be again.

And against that divorce backdrop, a flash of inspiration and light. The promise of something new, something grand--a better relationship. One where love will not always have to be checked on, schooled, managed, disciplined. Intuitive love and dedication, tattooed in our center. The meeting of a new person, exactly when we thought we had become unlovable. That 'teenage feeling,' but not only the chemical thrill of another person's presence, but also the promise that the feeling might be mutual. New dreams--but even more than new dreams, this new covenant offers to redeem our old dreams out of rehab, to show that they were not so much impossible as deferred.

That is some slice of the powerful emotional chemistry of Jeremiah in the reading for today. It simultaneously acknowledges the painful tragedy of separation with the low-rumbling pleasure of hope. Not denying one in favor of the other, but moving through death into resurrection.

As we watch the many dialogues of our age--sexuality, health care, impending economic disaster, the health of the planet--everyone tells us a different resurrection story, a different story about dissolved covenants and now renewed promises. Folks in support of gay rights speak of years death, and call upon now to be a time of a new covenant based on dedication rather than sexual orientation. Folks opposed to same sex unions or rights describe this time as one of death, hoping for a renewing of the covenant through constitutional amendments. In every one of those issues above--and for many others--people all tell their version of the argument, making it sound like a movement from death to resurrection.

All that to say: I wonder if we've all grown tired of the death/resurrection story. It seems, well normal. Commonplace. Jeremiah--and then Easter--ask us to plum some of the deepest parts of humanity, pushing toward God. But resurrection looks, in sense, pretty banal these days. Resurrect the economy! A new covenant of healthcare! 3 days in the tomb, and our planet shall rise again in carbon balance!

But what if we've grown bored, not of the deeper meaning and meat, but of the story?

How do we celebrate Easter in a world full of easters?

Idol worship! Finally!

Numbers 21:4-9


So the Old Testament lesson this week is pretty weird. All the people of Israel are continuing in their fantastic habit of bitching and moaning--"murmuring" is of course the preferred theological term--and they're doing it without cause. Complaining with cause seems to go fine--the Psalms offer plenty of examples of that. However, when there's no cause, I can quite clearly here God sounding much like Tom Hanks from A League of Their Own in the line we used on small children at summer camp: There's no crying in baseball! They complain, in the same breath, that they don't get any food anymore, and that the food sucks. We are all, in our hearts, 8 years old.

So God decides to punish them. Earlier in Numbers, there's a story much like this one--as brief and with as few explanations. There, the people on the edge of the camp just start burning up. Fairly impressive, that.

But here, God sends snakes. I can't help but think that, somehow, calling them poisonous snakes is not the fairest translation of the Hebrew. The word in Hebrew is 'Seraphim', which, as you may know from that lovely hymn with all the heavenly orders or the tabernacle in Isaiah, is also a word for flaming heavenly beings.

The people then repent--probably the flaming snake-beings speed that along. And so God has Moses build a giant bronze snake, stick it on a pole, and if people look up at it, they'll live.

So it's a weird story.

Quasi-idolatrous, supernatural, and entirely unexplained. And, even stranger, it's the very image that comes to mind when Jesus is talking to Nicodemus in the gospels lesson for the day, John 3:14, when Jesus is looking for an analogy to his crucifixion. Can you imagine? A story so common to Jesus that it sprang immediately to his mind, yet a story so unusual that many people I've spoken to this week have never heard it. If you'll pardon the mixing of internet and church lingo, RCL FTW for using new lessons!

So, what do we do this story? Usually, I think, we ignore it, like we try to ignore most of Numbers. And in the gospel, everyone acts as though the gravity of the story pulled the meaning toward verse 16 simply because it matches what people want to be Jesus' thesis statement. Looking at the Jesus/Nicodemus dialogue as a whole, it's probably not a thesis statement for that section or the whole.

That snake on a pole, by the way, turns up again in the Old Testament, somewhere in one of the Kings. Hezekiah, that great cleanser of Temple worship, finds it in the Temple. Apparently people have given it a name and started worshiping it--entirely unsurprising, in a way, and so Hezekiah tears it down and burns it.

So, does this commend idol worship to us? Probably not. After all, God does the healing--the people simply must have faith enough to look up at the snake. But it might, in a roundabout way, show something interesting.

The snake-on-a-pole (sounds like a fried treat you'd order at the fair for a small child) starts out as an icon, a window into the divine forgiveness and (literal) life that comes from God. Then, it becomes an idol, so much so that Hezekiah has not a worry in the world about getting rid of a thing that Moses himself made. The people confuse a window for a painting, a hole for a stop sign, an icon for an idol, a symbol for what points beyond it. The snake-on-a-pole is supposed to serve as a convenient meditation and prayer aid, and soon it starts receiving prayers.

If Jesus is asking us to see his own crucifixion in a similar light, perhaps we should also consider the ways that we turn that event into an idol. Certainly, we keep crosses everywhere, sometimes with dying Jesuses on them and sometimes not. We expect them to ward off vampires, scare the ghosts that go bump in the night--we build them into the architecture of most interior doors, as though a cross itself is protection. You know, just in case.

But our idolatry of crucifixion goes far deeper. We begin to revel in the pain, not share in the suffering that it symbolizes. It is the difference between the Ignatian exercises and Mel Gibson's Passion. The difference is in many ways a subtle one, lost to one who glosses over the similarities. But the two processes are enormously different--Ignatius inviting us to look through a window, where Gibson invites us to self-satisfaction at our own awe and disgust.

So, our friend the bronze serpent certainly suggests that one theme--the many ways that we turn Christ into an idol.

Lent is a time for self-examination . . .

Exodus 20

I was talking to a group of folks yesterday about the relevance of Old Testament notions of communal sin for the current economic crisis. Someone specifically referenced the reading this week in Exodus, this business about holding the 3rd and 4th generation accountable for the sins of the forebears. People, in American and elsewhere, are paying--with jobs or taxes or lost investments or lost money--for the sins of a few. As proud individualists, I think we have the tendency to say 'that's not fair!' both to this passage in Exodus and to this part of the economic crisis. So, in that conversation I was having yesterday, I thought they were probably right. I have long thought that this section of Exodus is descriptive, not proscriptive. It's not that God sees a sin, and then jumps out and boxes someone's ears for misbehaving (proscriptive). It's more like that this is simply the way the world works, and God is letting us know (descriptive). If parents sin, the cost of that sin will extend beyond themselves.

To someone with much experience of addiction, this is not a surprise. It's not fair that children and spouses of addicts pay a heavy cost for sins they did not commit, but they do. They have greater emotional burdens to unlearn, genes to overcome, ingrained habits to consider, practices to erase--and none of it is their fault. Perhaps, if we were willing to engage with it, our long fought (and almost totally ignored) battle with addiction would have taught us more about the looming economic difficulties. Perhaps addiction and money are related in all kinds of ways, ways that could have helped us. Or could still help us. (I am reminded of an acquaintance who once argued quite fervently to me that Anonymous in AA was a mixed blessing. At the same time it freed people to seek help without even greater shame than they already felt, it also prevents the wider public from knowing just how many people struggled with addiction--a number that would likely astound the world.)

But while I think this is all true, it struck me in my conversation yesterday that this was all 'old hat' for me, stuff I knew pretty well. I find myself wondering instead: why do we worry about the fairness of sins that affects 3 or 4 generations away, but we neglect the strange blessings that extends for thousands of generations? If I have gained some of my bad habits, or self-esteem, or socio-economic status from people beyond my control, why don't I wonder at the tiny gifts my ancestors, thousands of generations back, have given to me?

Sure, I'm judgmental, snobby, and self-centered. But I'm also compassionate. Why am I compassionate? Perhaps because my parents were--or perhaps because my pre-school teachers were--or perhaps because my first friends were. But why were they? Perhaps their parents were. Where in my human family did that compassion begin? Where did someone, sitting in front of a hearth on a cold night, say: I feel bad for my neighbors who have no hearth. Perhaps I could share.

Lent with its self-examination is too often a practice in the genealogy of badness. We sift through those thoughts, words, and deeds, done and undone, and try to map them out--"where did this come from? Why do I have such a temper?" And so on. Fine--that can be helpful, and hopefully we all know something of the role of repentance in our lives of faith.

But perhaps Lent should also be a time for a genealogy of goodness. "How did I learn when to hug someone, and when to give them a handshake? Why do dogs always make me smile?" Surely we pay for the sins of others, but we also receive benefits from the gifts of others. If it seems unfair that we must pay for the sins of the community, is it unfair that we have all benefited from long-gone loves, receiving grace upon grace?

If Lent is to be a time of self-examination, it must be honest. And honesty means that it can never be only a list of things done wrong, commandments violated. It must also be a list of things done well--flowers bought, money given away, time shared. Not all that we receive in our common life is a cause for repentance.

You reckon?

Romans 4:13-25

I'm going for brevity today. No bold promises, though. I bet I talk about abortion though. It's all over Romans this week.

So, Paul talks about this 'reckoned as righteousness' business. Do people actually use either of those words? 'Reckon'? They use that one in the southwest, as in: "It'll rain, I reckon." It has a more pecuniary background, though, usually meaning something to do with counting coins. Maybe too we yell at our sneaky siblings when they take our candy: "There will come a day of reckoning for this!" But probably not--that seems pretty dorky, even for me, and you, and all of us.

Or righteousness--how often do I use that word in conversation? I can't remember the last time. Probably when I used its adjective form back when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was in and proclaimed with Michelangelo: Righteous, dude!

So, in short, part of me questions this translation--it uses words that are, even for a geek, a bit of a stretch. They're not all bad, I suppose, but we should all try to remember that English requires its own English translation. The money connotations help make the whole thing work in translation. If we exchanged 'trust' for 'faith', we might see the thesis of Paul's argument and exegesis of Genesis running like this:


Abraham's trust in God counted as right-living.

What a whacky thing. Imagine if I cheated on my taxes--oh, let's say by not paying a hundred thousand because of a personal driver. Everyone has that problem, right? Anyway. So, I don't pay my taxes. The IRS comes to me and says: you owe us money. And I say: but I trust in you, IRS. I'll show you--I'll give you a hug! And I've been paying my tax since then! And they say: 'ah, that's alright--next time, try to pay your taxes. Don't worry about it--in fact, you'll be receiving a huge refund this year in addition to your stimulus check.' "Faith reckoned as righteousness" is exactly that weird.

In other words, the trust that we place in God--which is the strength of that relationship--is what counts as right-living us, and for everyone, according to Paul. The strength of our relationship with God is not the same thing as right-living, but that relationship God is willing to reckon as right-living. Not the same, but God's willing to take it.

That's like saying that my wife is willing to give me the consequences for trusting her, in lieu of the consequences of having an affair. "Oh honey," she says, "Don't worry about it--do better next time. And we're still going on vacation to Italy. And I'll do the dishes."

Paul spends much of his air time in Scripture defending the weirdness of this proposition--the 'all is lawful discussion' in 1 Corinthians, for example, deals with the moral ramifications of this statement. So for now, I don't want to defend it--if you want a longer defense, Romans deals mostly with this idea. Instead, I want to say a few things about what it means.

Let's start somewhere mild for our anxiety levels. Consider a traditional Lenten theme--forgiveness. So often, we let 12 step groups and TV evangelists steal our best lines. They often talk about how God forgives us of anything--12 step groups then have a method for living into that forgiveness, and TV evangelists forgo methods to ask for money. But if we take Paul seriously, not only does God forgive us--no matter how truly self-centered or evil we've been--not only does God give this forgiveness, but also God is willing to count trust in God as right-living from that point onward. Wherever we are this Lent--sick of constant self-obsession, bored with our families, hating the way we look in the mirror, greedy for yet another few bucks to spend, God is willing to start counting us as righteous people if we're willing to start trust God rather than attempting to make ourselves the center of the universe's gravity. I would add this second thought along this line: we're quick to talk about God's forgiveness for rather dramatic sins, but what about the less dramatic ones?

And second, let's talk about something more anxiety producing. I think this thesis, this trust in God being reckoned as right-living, is damned dangerous. Let me give an example. It would suggest that our cultural stances on abortion, whether we think it permissible but unfortunate or entirely illicit, are exactly wrong. Hauerwas (a perfectly delightful Christian ethicist), in his lovely little article on abortion--wish I had a link to it--, would be right. The question is not about moral legality--instead, we should trust God enough to welcome the stranger and foreigner. It's like we're being diagnosed as a sick patient. Rather than trust God, we would rather trust ourselves to mastering the truth about the personhood of dividing cells. We'd rather be masters than trusting, dependent.

If Paul's thesis is right, abortion is neither right nor wrong in itself--or more accurately, what matters to God when it concerns us is not the righteousness of a thing, which we're not good at, but our trusting of God. Whether abortion is part of righteous life is beside the point, according to Paul's thesis. It is only one possible indicator of whether we are trusting God. Individually, this makes making a choice about abortion no simpler--it seems entirely possible to me that someone might trust in God and have an abortion, and that for another person that trust and an abortion would be impossible to hold together.

But for all the rest of us, not facing this choice but trying to understand our society and its rules, Paul's thesis condemns us pretty soundly.

If Christ has called us to welcome the stranger as an example of our trust in God; if children are the truly perfect strangers; and if having children has become a thing that is easily feared in our society; then the sickness will never be solved by debating one way of alleviating the symptom (abortion). Abortion is not a moral problem--it's a symptom of our fearfulness of strangers, of someone who might make demands on me that I can't control. Instead, we must confront the sickness--we must face our shared complicity in a culture that ostracizes single parents (it's popular to lament their situation, but it's not popular to be one), so enmeshes sex in shame that people fear to speak of it, keeps a permanent lower class stripped of economic possibility and plain old hope, and ultimately, we must face a culture that is so afraid of the stranger that we'd rather either kill the stranger before they're born, or permanently punish the parents of the stranger by strapping them with obligations our society conspires to prevent them achieving. If Paul is right, and God reckons our trust in God as righteousness, then our debate about abortion, while well-intentioned, has missed the point. Abortion is a symptom of a wider problem, made worse when we deny the existence of any kind of corporate sin or responsibility. God has asked us to follow in trust, welcoming the stranger, caring for the widow and orphan, sharing what we have even when it looks like it's not enough. Funny how we'd rather still debate righteousness.

Our trust in God reckoned as right-living? Probably the most radical words in Scripture.

Ash Wednesday

I know that many are thinking about Ash Wednesday, or even preaching on it. Here are 1 or 2 scattered thoughts:

1. I am not in a Lenten mood. I find myself less excited about 40 days of fasting and whatnot than I usually am. Normally, Lent is right up my alley.

But what do we do for those of us for whom the liturgical year is not matching up to the realities of our life? I often wonder this, even as a big fan of the liturgical year. Where does Lent find us when we are excited about life, when we have had plenty of Lenten experiences over the last six or nine months? What happens if we've fasted for months, only to approach a feast-time in our hearts in Lent?

Perhaps there is such a thing as a happy Lent. The word itself comes from the same root word as 'lengthen,' as in, the days are getting longer, and so we have Lent in springtime. Lent is a celebration of spring. Should we march through it facing only the cross, pretending (because it would be pretend) that we don't know about the resurrection on the other side? Should we marching facing the resurrection, trying to ignore the unpleasantness that happens on the way?

Perhaps the hymn is right: "To bow the head in sackcloth and in ashes/ or rend the soul, such grief is not Lent's goal/ But to be led/ to where God's glory flashes his beauty to come near." What if Lent is a beautiful time?

2. I loathe praying in public restaurants, not to mention at home, and I proof-text the gospel lesson as my example. Don't pray in public indeed--go home and shut your door people. So I'm fond of this lesson.

But that does stand in interesting contrast to the Isaiah lesson--what is fasting and making humble but justice for the poor, the orphan, the widow, it asks. But if our fast is to be justice for these, we cannot very well do it in the quiet of our rooms. If all is not okay with the orphan and widow, should we put oil on our head and go about our business?

It's a tough contrast. I'm not sure how to resolve it.

Jesus the Clear

Last Sunday after Epiphany, Year B
2nd Corinthians 4:3-6

I want to talk this time around about 2nd Corinthians. And if I'm going to do that, we're going to have to talk about Paul, whose letters are likely anthologized and edited into the form that we have in 2nd Corinthians. So let's get this out of the way. Paul's an asshole. He's also very likely one of the best pastors, successful missionaries, and accidental theologians our Christian community has ever known.

So much debate on the popular level of Christianity these days, carried on in the front seats of cars and at brief Bible studies, hangs on whether the participants "like" Paul or not. In general, conservatives 'love' Paul; liberals, not so much. While I relate to desire to have that debate, I'm not sure the answer to that question does as much as we want.

For example, if Paul were here in the flesh, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like him. In his letters, he's often pompous, frequently angry, and insufferably self-righteous. Over the course of his life, it's pretty clear that he runs off a number of his friends, and he often undermines the very people who try to defend him. It would be interesting to compare Paul's character to Jesus'. It's hard to imagine two people who would have been less alike--although Jesus was hardly likable in his own way.

But even if I don't like Paul, or wouldn't have liked Paul in flesh, I'd have to admit that his writings are really pretty good--and more than pretty good, many of them are pretty amazing in spite of themselves. Sure, they have problems that very much reflect the man. It is very interesting to wonder if, as a member of the communion of saints, he regrets his hasty comments about sexuality and women. I have long suspected that were we to ask him, he would blame other people--somehow, that seems like his modus operandi to me, and I suspect that spiritual bodies change us only so much.

But anyone who has ever seriously heard his words at a funeral knows that the Holy Spirit speaks directly through them. "Neither height, nor depth, nor angels, nor principalities" and "putting on new bodies" indeed. For all that it is true that Paul was and may well still be an ass, that didn't prevent him from also being the accidental source for most of the New Testament. So profound were his thoughts and cares, and so deep his faith, that they still manage to come through even some of his worst moments.

And to anyone who struggles with Paul, I'll share one last thought. A very helpful mentor in my life once told me that the distance between me and someone I don't like is really only the distance between two different parts of myself. If Paul is a jerk, maybe how much that bothers us tells us more about us than about Paul. Our faith asks us neither to agree with Paul nor to like him. Our faith asks us to recognize God speaking in his writings and claim him as a member of our family.

So, as we look at this lesson 2nd Corinthians, it's helpful to note that Paul doesn't start it simply. "Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing." The god of this world has blinded the minds of those who are unbelievers, says Paul.

This passage alone is enormously difficult and could easily be controversial. It's one of those things we often let sail in church, and no one really listens to it, so no one really complains, and we all go about our business without dealing with the fact that it was just read in our midst. But deep down, I find that this phraseology bothers folks. It makes it sound like we live in clear-cut world, at least at a quick read, made worse when we don't acknowledge it. It makes it sound like: believer=life, unbeliever=perishing.

Perhaps the first quesiton is: Are, in fact, unbelievers perishing--that is, are people who aren't Christian dying? And Paul doesn't seem to mean this in some purely eschatological, end-of-the-world sense. He also doesn't seem to mean it in a strictly biological sense, as all of us, believing and otherwise, are still dying biologically. Instead, he seems to mean that right now, the 'perishing' are leaking life and becoming like the dead. Is that true?

That's a hard question. Most of us are friends with a great number of people who are not Christians, and either our fear or defensiveness immediately asserts itself to make us deny that unbelievers are perishing--that seems like a nasty thought about our friends. But the truth, at least in my experience, is quite a bit more complicated. I have known 'unbelievers' who were most definitely not perishing, but instead were gaining life. And I have known believers who were most definitely perishing, dying right there on the vine.

So let's do something unusual--let's cut Paul some slack, and let's assume that he is as bright as we are. Perhaps Paul, too, has had just this experience--that the relationship between perishing and belief is not so straightforward. And this certainly is true of Paul--after all, Jews, who were nonbelievers, do not seem to be perishing in Paul's view. And Paul has all kinds of writings about the believers who are be perishing.

So what, then, is Paul talking about? Perhaps, instead, he's making a general point, not intended to apply in every case. Just like I make general points like: going to the DMV sucks. Does it literally always suck? No--sometimes, it's quite painless. But nonetheless, I would assert without fear that going to the DMV sucks. Or going to the emergency room. That sucks, too--unless, of course, my heart has stopped, or I've broken a leg. Then, there's nowhere else I'd rather be--officially, being there does not suck in those situations. We, too, make general statements that are true, even if they have a number of perfectly good exceptions. So perhaps holding Paul to the letter of this sentence reveals not that Paul was childish, but that we're being childish.

Paul, therefore, on a the simplest level, seems to be noting the fact that not everyone believes this nutty business about Jesus. This is pretty obvious, something we all see as clearly in our own era as Paul had seen it in Corinth (which, I think we should try to remember, was the Branson, Missouri of the Roman Empire, if Branson were a primary seaport full of diverse ethnic groups, and if Branson specialized not in washed-up celebrities but in finest cheap hookers and easily obtained drugs. Las Vegas is much classier than Corinth was, so I think Branson captures it better).

So why don't other people 'get it'? That's the natural question, when we have gained so much life from our faith and other people role their eyes at us. Why doesn't everyone embrace new life? Paul says: well, it's like the god of this world has blinded their minds. It's like greed, the desire to live without pain, and the cruel happiness of the torturer have all occluded the mind's eye, like a cataract, or near-sightedness, or blindness. Paul isn't trying to say what all nonbelievers are like--he's trying to say what some of them are like, some of them that we encounter more often than we'd care to.

And then Paul moves forward with this analogy. What characterizes us, the Christians, is not that we proclaim ourselves 'Christians.' What characterizes us is not a proclamation about us. It is that we proclaim Jesus as Lord--and don't lose the power of that image and analogy. Jesus is the individual who owns us body and soul, the person who lets us lease his land so that we can grow our vegetables and livestock, the person who protects when neighboring countries attack. Jesus, an odd and short-lived individual from Nazareth and Galilee--that's our Lord. Not only this, but what further characterizes us is that, if we watch the grammar closely, we have declared that we are slaves to one another, out of respect for Jesus.

And then Paul adds this business about the same God who spoke light into being has spoken into being the knowledge in our heads about God in the light of Jesus' life. That's a really extended image, so let's unpack it for a moment. Here it is briefly:

God speaks. Heart opens. Sees Jesus in new way. Seeing Jesus is seeing God. We see a new thing about God.

So, let's put it all together. The passage seems not to be much about 'unbelievers.' It is, instead, reflecting how those who have been believing for a while might understand their own faith. Perhaps a worldly god has blocked the eyesight of others, says Paul, but whatever the case, this need not interfere with the truths we have seen. Instead, the passage is mostly about God has opened a new light in us, showing us to look at Jesus, and there we have seen the truth about God.

Whew. Reading Paul can be rather complex.

But what does this mean? A few things, I think, as we read these last lessons and then plunge on into Lent. First, there's just the raw theology that Paul is doing there, and we as Christians have done a bad job teaching and speaking this theology to one another. Jesus is the clearest picture of God. In him, we see God's glory--that is to say, God's love. From his care for the sick, from his challenging of his friends, from his willingness to die--we see what that kind of love looks like, the kind of love God holds for us.

Nowhere here do we hear that Jesus is our friend, or about holding a moral standard on abortion, or do we sing about holding his hand. There may be other parts of scripture that lend themselves to that kind of conversation--fine. But we ignore this part. We look at Jesus because there we see what is true about God--we don't see everything true about God, but there we see something that we can know that is true about God. God loves us, and this inspires us to take Jesus as our Lord, giving up our lives to each other like slaves do.

Second, let's develop some of the imagery here. If Jesus is the clearest picture of what is true about God, a vision so inspiring that it changes us, this does not mean that there are no other pictures of God that can be, to varying degrees, true. Jesus may be the clearest picture, the most truthful, even the best, but this does not preclude God being evident in other ways. As Christians, we may well say that, for example, our Buddhist friends certainly seem to have some picture of the truth that is God. In that sense, those who seem to have seen part of the picture that we have seen are most certainly not perishing--maybe not life in the same way or to the same degree, but certainly not perishing.

It may sound condescending to say: well, I see this perfectly, and those poor benighted not-like-mes see imperfectly. But we can also say it in ways that are not condescending. I do believe Jesus is the clearest picture of God. My Buddhist friends disagree with me. But I see something admirable in the picture they see of God, even if they don't use that word or language--and they, perhaps, see something admirable in the picture I see.

This is, best as I can tell, the basis of all interfaith conversations that happens. We don't expect each other to agree, but we can find admirable things in one another, and we can work together on some things.

However, I am constantly surprised how many apparently faith Christians speak to me about whether they could ever be truly Christian since that would mean that they would therefore believe everyone else went to some kind of hell. Somehow, what good interfaith groups do has in no way touched the hearts of most of us--mostly, our hearts are still shaken by the judgmental among us.

But this is based on the false belief that in order for me to be right, all others who disagree must be wrong. Paul clearly doesn't believe this. If Jesus is the clearest vision of God, this suggests that other visions of various qualities exist. Paul strongly defends what he believes, and believe it he does--other visions are flawed, and Paul will go to great lengths to explain why. But that does not make them wrong, not the sense that our popular culture seems to understand Christian faith.

In other words: just because I think I'm right, doesn't mean I have to think everyone else is wrong. That's a false dichotomy--it's capitalist, actually, assuming a zero sum game around the 'commodity' of truth.

Because the question of truth, as Paul is describing it, is not a black/white issue. It's a relational issue, or a visual issue, and visions can be blurry, partially blocked, or clear, and all still be visions.

I can't help but think we should send sing fewer songs about Jesus becoming my boyfriend, and more songs about how through Jesus, we have all seen with clarity.