St. Bartholomew’s Church
September 8, 2019
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
I can’t believe I volunteered to preach on today’s Gospel. I mean, really, what was I thinking?
There’s no softening this one.
Today’s Gospel is Jesus at his most forbidding, his most challenging. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”
Then the follow up: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
And just in case you didn’t see it coming, Jesus adds “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”
So I did what I always do—I went to my sources. On Luke, that means I go to Joseph Fitzmyer’s massive and brilliant explication of Luke in the Anchor Bible series, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, and the commentary on Luke by my favorite Anglican theologian, Charles Gore—I say my favorite Anglican theologian, because I’m a fan of Nadia Bolz-Weber. Just to be sure, I consulted The Interpreter’s Bible—12 volumes I was given by the priest who supervised me at my field parish, where I trained for an academic year before I was ordained.
Basically, all the commentary can be summarized in four words: “Yeah. He meant it.”
Oh, Gore, with his typical subtlety, points out that “hate” here does not mean an emotion, but that just as love is an action, a promise, a commitment, so too here is hate—“the will directed toward action,” not feeling or emotion.[1]
And, Gore tells us, Jesus is laying down the “the sternest, most repellent claim—the claim for absolute renunciation of all natural ties and every kind of self-interest as the first condition for discipleship.” [2]
And yet, we don’t live that way.
We can’t live that way.
We do love our spouses, our families—biological or logical—our friends.
And we do not give away all our possessions.
Even in the Roman Catholic Church, only clergy, monks and nuns, are called to celibacy and lives of renunciation of the world. And yet even they engage lovingly with family.
The most fundamentalist churches, priding themselves on fidelity to scripture, do not follow this passage, because it is so hard to deny love, family, friendship.
We do not, in part because we recognize it as a form of self-harm. Without love, we grow distorted, angry, bitter. Like plants without sunshine, we wither without love, and only a very, very few of us can recognize a genuine call to celibacy and withdrawal from the world.
But even that is not what Jesus is speaking of here. Because picking up our cross means being in the world, but embracing shame, humiliation, and the rejection of the broader community, up to and including death.
This is Christianity at its most costly, its most harsh, its most difficult.
I’m not going to suggest that this is an easy Gospel. I’d be lying to you. But I think if we pull these verses out and make them into a self-standing, isolated code of life, we will either reject what Jesus is teaching us, or condemn ourselves to lives of self-inflicted isolation and deprivation. And when I think of Jesus in the Gospel According to John saying that he has come so that we might have life, and have it in abundance, we have to reflect more deeply on this Gospel to truly understand it.
The secular writer Steven Moffatt has written that “Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit – without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis,” he says, and tells a tale of two old friends, who have taken radically different paths. One is a hero, the other has become a criminal. When the hero asks his old friend for her help against seemingly insuperable odds, she refuses to throw away her life in a futile cause, and leaves him. But then, she changes her mind, and returns to help her former friend—only to be killed before she can reach him.
She dies, without hope, without witness, without reward.
She dies, knowing that her death did not help, that she will not be remembered or honored. She dies knowing that no one—not even her friend—will even know that she was coming to help him.
Virtue is only virtue in extremis—that is, virtue is only virtue when it costs. It is easy to lead an inoffensive life. But, if we look at Moffat’s tale as a parable, maybe we can catch a glimpse of what today’s Gospel is teaching us.
We are called to lives of heroic virtue, unheroic people though we may be, though I am. We are called to, as Gore wrote, direct our wills toward action—in plain language, to be ready to subordinate everything—comfort, family life, our position in the community—to witness the truth of Jesus Christ. To back up our professed belief that the ultimate truth, the absolute truth of the world is love. Not love as a pleasant feeling, or a diluted ethic of niceness, but love as a commitment, a promise.
That promise is a frightening one to make, because it requires us to actually be willing to pay the price of redeeming our word.
We can all point to stories of heroic virtue. Some are famous—Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela—so famous that the very establishments that sought to break their commitment now honors them, if only by lip service.
But there are stories of quiet heroism, of loving despite cost. The gentlest man I have ever known was my grandmother’s second husband when my sister and I were in our early teens. We called him Uncle Fred. He had served in World War II, and had helped liberate a concentration camp.
That youthful experience of wholesale, industrialized horror burned all the violence out of him. Later in his life, when we knew him, his much-loved daughter was murdered, her killer suspected, but never caught.
A little grimmer, a little greyer, Uncle Fred turned his love toward my grandmother, my sister, me, and our younger cousin.
It took heroism to commit to love again after his wartime experience, and to maintain that commitment, that promise, after my Aunt Carol’s murder.
He did it without witness—he was just acting like a normal person, not flaunting his sorrows. He did it, and here I must depart from Moffatt a little bit, with hope—hope not that the pain and loss would be magically healed, but that refused to give in to the face of the most obscene evil, both on the world stage and in his own family life. Uncle Fred continued to believe in the primacy of love, and to teach the children who loved him to love.
I know he did it not for reward, but I like to think his last family, the family he and my grandmother created in marrying—was rewarding to him.
That life of virtue in extremis, in the face of loss and the experience of cruelty, may shed a light on today’s Gospel. Jesus teaches us to put family ties, self-esteem, possessions behind the source of all of those good things—to not let ourselves be held hostage by them.
In AA we call this putting first things first—sobriety is more important than anything else. Because it is the condition of any kind of wholeness, of any spiritual growth.
Jesus is warning us that discipleship is hard.
That we may pay a price for it.
And if we intend to follow Him, we need to find courage inside our anxious hearts, and be ready to lose anything and everything along the way.
So when we lose them, when we are hurt to the very heart, we will not, as Job’s wife invites her husband to do, “curse God and die.” Rather, we continue on, always remembering that we are called to live abundantly, to our last breath, and to remember that the feeling of hate is always foolish, while the promise of love is always wise.
In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
[1]Charles Gore, “The Gospel According to Luke,” in Gore, Goudge & Guillame, A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, Pt. 2: The New Testament, 228-229 (1929).
[2]. Id.
Showing posts with label The Diaconate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Diaconate. Show all posts
Sunday, September 8, 2019
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Not As the World Gives: A Sermon on John 14:23-29
(Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church, NYC, May 1, 2016
“I do not give to you as the world gives.”
Well, there’s the problem right there, isn’t it?
We like how the world gives. When it gives, at any rate.
Because comfort, money, distractions—you know I could write this sermon on a phone while watching a cat video?—yeah, we’re basically ok with how the world gives.
After all, the world is falling over itself to give us what we want.
Not so much what we need, but what we want, as long as we can afford to pay.
I know what some of you are thinking—is this going to be one of those dreary sermons where everything that’s fun is held up as a sin. And the devil, to steal a line from Bernard Shaw, gets to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?
No.
I’m not going to suggest you scatter ashes all over your brunch so that the taste of your food doesn’t distract you from the contemplation of God.
That would be St. Francis.
And I’m not going to suggest that you should agonize at length over whether your pleasure in enjoying that brunch is sinful, because it doesn’t serve the purpose of preserving your health, it’s simply gratuitous. That’d be St. Augustine, and he was a great example of the reformed rake who may be much more decent than he was in his unreformed days, but is nowhere near as much fun.
No, I’m not going there. But here’s where I’d like to go: When Jesus says he doesn’t give as the world gives, he means that the gifts of God are not conditional.
What we build up, what we are given by the society in which we live, the careers we pursue, those gifts are conditional. Lose a job, and a whole cherished way of life can be stripped from us. Homes, relationships, status—all of these can be lost, because they’re never really ours.
But what is really ours, then?
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says it’s peace—“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.”
It might help focus our attention on what he’s giving us if we remember where we are in the Gospel. You and I may be six weeks into Easter season, but Jesus is at the Last Supper. He’s washed the feet of his disciples, he’s looking ahead to Judas’s betrayal, and Peter’s, and he’s saying that right there, right then, he is giving them peace.
So, really not as the world gives. Not power, not possessions, not status, not conditional. Something that will get the disciples through the ordeal of the morning, and strengthen them for their journey as an Easter People.
Peace.
Peace doesn’t mean quiet here, or ease. But it’s hard to define what it does mean. The peace of God, which, according to Paul, surpasses all understanding, isn’t going to be captured in a single homily.
But we can begin to see aspects of Jesus’s gift of peace by watching its effects gift in the lives of the apostles.
Peter and the other apostles weren’t exactly profiles in courage prior to the Crucifixion. When the guards came to take Jesus, they ran away and hid; Peter denied knowing him. Thomas refused to believe the testimony of his sisters and brothers in God that they had seen him.
In their different ways, the Twelve were paralyzed by fear.
But after their encounters with the risen Christ, these unimpressive, deeply frightened disciples all went out and taught openly, defying the authorities. And they did it calmly, good naturedly even—not making scenes, but sharing their truth with all who would listen.
Not afraid anymore, and not with bravado—the false courage that hides fear. They knew who they were, and were going about their Father’s business.
And that self-knowledge and that calm certainty that their following Jesus was the most meaningful thing they could do freed them to communicate that self knowledge and self-acceptance to others—to Steven, the first deacons, even to Paul, who persecuted them until the discovery of his own best self knocked him to the ground. It was the very people he had persecuted who helped him to come to terms with the revolution in his own soul.
They were at peace.
But that peace isn’t that of the world—they weren’t accepted by society, they weren’t rich and respected, they weren’t popular with the Establishment.
What they were is themselves.
In his Confessions, St, Augustine writes, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.”
When St. Augustine wrote those words he was describing his own experience. This was a man who had tried living for pleasure, tried living a life of the intellect, tried living for others.
None of it worked.
He even tried the life of a religious believer. He’d joined the sect of the Manichees, who believed that the world was divided between the Light—which represented the life of the spirit—and the Dark, which represented the life of the flesh. It was a subtle faith, for educated people. The religious life structured around a parable of guilt over the desires of the flesh.
Which, as someone who was brought up a Long Island Catholic, sounds like old times to me.
But Augustine couldn’t function in that atmosphere. He couldn’t flourish in a faith that required him to embrace only part of himself. And when he learned more about the Christian faith, more about the incarnated God, something in the idea that God could be with us, could be like us, could be one of us, spoke to him with a truth that the subtleties of the Manicheans could not.
That’s because Christ promised integration, not division of the Self.
So many faiths ask us to abandon who we are, to conform to some external standard that has been imposed on us. Be a good consumer, a good employee, a good Democrat, a good Republican, a good Christian—
--oh, yes, the Church can sometimes try to divide us between the Light and the Dark, and keep only the Light. Think of the Prosperity Gospel. Think of anytime the Church or a church has stoked up anger against the other, and let us off the hook, while we cherish our own righteous indignation. We’re being invited to take one facet of ourselves as defining our whole self, and defining that Light against the Other, who is cast as the Dark.
Nice and easy. Christianity on the cheap. I’m OK because you’re not ok. Or I’m ok, because I’m not you.
But what drew Augustine in, why Augustine matters nearly 1600 years after his death, was that he lived today’s Gospel. He was restless with his life—which was a pretty good one, by most standards—until he found himself in God. He found peace, the peace Jesus left with the disciples.
How can we find that peace?
We can begin by not confusing the parts of our lives with the whole. Don’t let the roles we play in various parts of our lives become a mask to hide under. Recognize that there is more to each of us than our jobs, our careers, ourhobbies.
Do you feel restless, dissatisfied?
Good. “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.” If your heart is restless, you’re on the path.
So be patient with yourself. If we’re told to love our neighbors as ourselves, we’d better have some love for ourselves. And that means patience.
Finally, don’t be surprised if you find yourself impelled to do something different from what you’ve done before. Ten years ago, having just turned 40, I felt myself tugged towards ordained ministry. Here I am now.
As mid-life crises go, it’s been pretty good.
Because the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, is trying to teach you something. She’s not pleading on your behalf to some hostile judge or jury. You’re the one she’s arguing with, pleading with sometimes. You’re the one she’s trying to help lead to integration, to wholeness.
If you let her, the Advocate will lead you to “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” [1]
And in so doing, lead you to the Peace of Christ, which is not given as the world gives, but can be yours no matter where you are in life.
May the peace of the Lord be with you.
Amen.
_____________________
[1] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC at pp. 118-119.
“I do not give to you as the world gives.”
Well, there’s the problem right there, isn’t it?
We like how the world gives. When it gives, at any rate.
Because comfort, money, distractions—you know I could write this sermon on a phone while watching a cat video?—yeah, we’re basically ok with how the world gives.
After all, the world is falling over itself to give us what we want.
Not so much what we need, but what we want, as long as we can afford to pay.
I know what some of you are thinking—is this going to be one of those dreary sermons where everything that’s fun is held up as a sin. And the devil, to steal a line from Bernard Shaw, gets to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?
No.
I’m not going to suggest you scatter ashes all over your brunch so that the taste of your food doesn’t distract you from the contemplation of God.
That would be St. Francis.
And I’m not going to suggest that you should agonize at length over whether your pleasure in enjoying that brunch is sinful, because it doesn’t serve the purpose of preserving your health, it’s simply gratuitous. That’d be St. Augustine, and he was a great example of the reformed rake who may be much more decent than he was in his unreformed days, but is nowhere near as much fun.
No, I’m not going there. But here’s where I’d like to go: When Jesus says he doesn’t give as the world gives, he means that the gifts of God are not conditional.
What we build up, what we are given by the society in which we live, the careers we pursue, those gifts are conditional. Lose a job, and a whole cherished way of life can be stripped from us. Homes, relationships, status—all of these can be lost, because they’re never really ours.
But what is really ours, then?
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says it’s peace—“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.”
It might help focus our attention on what he’s giving us if we remember where we are in the Gospel. You and I may be six weeks into Easter season, but Jesus is at the Last Supper. He’s washed the feet of his disciples, he’s looking ahead to Judas’s betrayal, and Peter’s, and he’s saying that right there, right then, he is giving them peace.
So, really not as the world gives. Not power, not possessions, not status, not conditional. Something that will get the disciples through the ordeal of the morning, and strengthen them for their journey as an Easter People.
Peace.
Peace doesn’t mean quiet here, or ease. But it’s hard to define what it does mean. The peace of God, which, according to Paul, surpasses all understanding, isn’t going to be captured in a single homily.
But we can begin to see aspects of Jesus’s gift of peace by watching its effects gift in the lives of the apostles.
Peter and the other apostles weren’t exactly profiles in courage prior to the Crucifixion. When the guards came to take Jesus, they ran away and hid; Peter denied knowing him. Thomas refused to believe the testimony of his sisters and brothers in God that they had seen him.
In their different ways, the Twelve were paralyzed by fear.
But after their encounters with the risen Christ, these unimpressive, deeply frightened disciples all went out and taught openly, defying the authorities. And they did it calmly, good naturedly even—not making scenes, but sharing their truth with all who would listen.
Not afraid anymore, and not with bravado—the false courage that hides fear. They knew who they were, and were going about their Father’s business.
And that self-knowledge and that calm certainty that their following Jesus was the most meaningful thing they could do freed them to communicate that self knowledge and self-acceptance to others—to Steven, the first deacons, even to Paul, who persecuted them until the discovery of his own best self knocked him to the ground. It was the very people he had persecuted who helped him to come to terms with the revolution in his own soul.
They were at peace.
But that peace isn’t that of the world—they weren’t accepted by society, they weren’t rich and respected, they weren’t popular with the Establishment.
What they were is themselves.
In his Confessions, St, Augustine writes, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.”
When St. Augustine wrote those words he was describing his own experience. This was a man who had tried living for pleasure, tried living a life of the intellect, tried living for others.
None of it worked.
He even tried the life of a religious believer. He’d joined the sect of the Manichees, who believed that the world was divided between the Light—which represented the life of the spirit—and the Dark, which represented the life of the flesh. It was a subtle faith, for educated people. The religious life structured around a parable of guilt over the desires of the flesh.
Which, as someone who was brought up a Long Island Catholic, sounds like old times to me.
But Augustine couldn’t function in that atmosphere. He couldn’t flourish in a faith that required him to embrace only part of himself. And when he learned more about the Christian faith, more about the incarnated God, something in the idea that God could be with us, could be like us, could be one of us, spoke to him with a truth that the subtleties of the Manicheans could not.
That’s because Christ promised integration, not division of the Self.
So many faiths ask us to abandon who we are, to conform to some external standard that has been imposed on us. Be a good consumer, a good employee, a good Democrat, a good Republican, a good Christian—
--oh, yes, the Church can sometimes try to divide us between the Light and the Dark, and keep only the Light. Think of the Prosperity Gospel. Think of anytime the Church or a church has stoked up anger against the other, and let us off the hook, while we cherish our own righteous indignation. We’re being invited to take one facet of ourselves as defining our whole self, and defining that Light against the Other, who is cast as the Dark.
Nice and easy. Christianity on the cheap. I’m OK because you’re not ok. Or I’m ok, because I’m not you.
But what drew Augustine in, why Augustine matters nearly 1600 years after his death, was that he lived today’s Gospel. He was restless with his life—which was a pretty good one, by most standards—until he found himself in God. He found peace, the peace Jesus left with the disciples.
How can we find that peace?
We can begin by not confusing the parts of our lives with the whole. Don’t let the roles we play in various parts of our lives become a mask to hide under. Recognize that there is more to each of us than our jobs, our careers, ourhobbies.
Do you feel restless, dissatisfied?
Good. “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.” If your heart is restless, you’re on the path.
So be patient with yourself. If we’re told to love our neighbors as ourselves, we’d better have some love for ourselves. And that means patience.
Finally, don’t be surprised if you find yourself impelled to do something different from what you’ve done before. Ten years ago, having just turned 40, I felt myself tugged towards ordained ministry. Here I am now.
As mid-life crises go, it’s been pretty good.
Because the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, is trying to teach you something. She’s not pleading on your behalf to some hostile judge or jury. You’re the one she’s arguing with, pleading with sometimes. You’re the one she’s trying to help lead to integration, to wholeness.
If you let her, the Advocate will lead you to “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” [1]
And in so doing, lead you to the Peace of Christ, which is not given as the world gives, but can be yours no matter where you are in life.
May the peace of the Lord be with you.
Amen.
_____________________
[1] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC at pp. 118-119.
Sunday, March 27, 2016
Easter, 2016
My first Easter since my ordination, and several challenges.
First, the Easter Vigil. Despite a shocking cough, barely held at bay by (I believe) a formula originally designed as a colic draught for horses, I sang the introit, carrying the Paschal Candle. In the dark, mind you, following the Thurifier, reading the Gospel--which I of course censed properly, with a satisfying clank of chain against thurible (between Deacon Denise LaVetty and Fr. Sam Cross, there's no way I'm ever messing that up again!).
At the end of the vigil, la Caterina proposed a quick trip to Katz's Deli, which I haven't visited in some years, and, yes, my friend who maintains that it has the finest pastrami available is right. Combined with matzah ball soup, cole slaw, and celery soda (no, really), it was an unwise feast for so late at night, but delicious.
Up far too soon, coughing like Alan Swann after a late night, but another horse-draught put me right (Siegfried Farnon's prescription, I rather think).
Easter Day services? More familiar territory, but handling "Big Bertha" at the altar (a heavy silver pitcher like a prop out of The Pallisers from which the Duke of Omnium's guests would get their wine) was tricky; coaxing the wine into the chalice from her without any spillage? Divine intervention. Huge crowds, fantastic music (the sample above is from last year; I do not appear in the video--if one exists from this year, I'll post upon finding.)
So many people--dear friends, friendly acquaintances, strangers, tourists--even an old high school friend popping up out of the blue. All wonderful, but with the church filled to bursting, we we're beginning to wonder if the 9 am service would be done in time for the 11 am service to start. (We call this a luxury problem.)
We go out on a hymn, as my field placement pastor used to say, and then the incomparable Widor Toccata as played by the inimitable Bill Trafka.
My first Triduum as clergy (!) is completed. All in a mad rush of friendship, good words well spoken, brilliant music seasoned with the scent of incense and a little deli.
What more could I ask?
Friday, March 25, 2016
"Father, Forgive": A Mediation on Luke 23:34
[Delivered today at St. Bartholomew's Church as part of the Seven Last Words Good Friday liturgy. I was honored to share the pulpit with some of my favorite clergy and lay people; you can hear all of our meditations here]
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
When I graduated law school, my parents took my sister and me to England, the one place I had always wanted to visit. My mother worked for a travel agency, and we were on a bus tour of England and Scotland. We stopped at Oxford for a day, and Cambridge. We saw Stonehenge, and the moors where the Hound of the Baskervilles hunted.
One day, we visited Coventry, and pulled up in front of a very modern, frankly not all that impressive cathedral. As we piled off the bus, I wondered why we were even stopping there. As we went around, I saw why.
The outer walls of the old cathedral, a medieval masterpiece, had survived the bombing of the cathedral in November 1940, the height of the blitz. Nothing else had, mind you. The windows, gone, the roof, fallen in. Utter devastation. And not just the Cathedral.
That night, 568 people were killed; approximately 1200 people were injured, 863 of them seriously. Nearly 8,000 houses were either destroyed outright or required evacuation for repair.
The next day, Richard Howard, the Provost of the Cathedral, chalked on the wall of the ruined sanctuary the words “Father, Forgive.”
Later, when it was safe to inspect the still smoldering ruin, the cathedral stonemason, Jock Forbes, found two of the roofbeams, still linked, charred and twisted though they were, forming a cross. Forbes set the beams up behind an altar made from the rubble. Our tour guide told us that the first service said was for the souls of the German pilots, as well as for those killed in the air raid.
The altar read simply, “Father, Forgive.”
As I stood in the middle of that ruined cathedral, long after the others wandered into the shiny new one, I couldn’t take my eyes of that cross, off that inscription.
“Father, Forgive.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off it because I had only recently read that in late 1940, the threat of invasion still loomed over England. And that, if a beachhead were established by that invasion, “all would be lost, for it is a peculiarity of England’s island that its southern weald is indefensible against disciplined troops.”
With their cathedral and a large parts of the City destroyed, who could blame the people of Coventry if they wanted revenge? Or even if they just wanted safety, and the defeat of the invaders. But they forgave.
And this act of forgiveness was not done after the fact, from a position of safety. In fact, the people of Coventry forgave their attackers even when the forces of evil looked to be poised to triumph over them. The prayed for their attackers to be forgiven when it looked like the damage was not just incalculable, but irreparable. They forgave when it seemed that all was lost.
A few weeks later, on Christmas Day, Provost Howard of the Cathedral spoke over the radio from the ruins. He asked those who were listening “to banish all thoughts of revenge” and called on them to “make a kinder, simpler world—a more Christ-Child like world.”
We’re a long way from that kinder, simpler world Richard Howard prayed for on that Christmas Day here, this afternoon. Even though Lent started so early, this year, it feels further away from Christmas than I would have thought possible.
No, we’re here on Good Friday 2016. Just three days after a terror attack in Brussels on Tuesday claimed at least 30 lives.
And here we are, in the shadow of the Cross.
“Father, forgive them, for they know what they do.”
How hard it is to say those words with anything like conviction. It’s like that part of the Lord’s Prayer, when we ask God to forgive us for the hurts we inflict, just like we forgive the people who have hurt us. I don’t always say that part of the prayer with the intentionality it deserves.
But Jesus did. And Jesus does.
Maybe it’s because He knows us better than we know ourselves, and is able to understand how easy it is to fool ourselves into the worst betrayals, the worst crimes. After all, Peter has denied him out of fear, Judas has sold him for profit, the Temple authorities have betrayed him to the Romans, and the Romans—well, imagine the betrayal of finding in the occupier of your nation someone who gets it, knows that you’re not guilty, and then, as a matter of politics, sends you to death anyway.
And yet, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
In my Catholic boyhood, I was taught to understand that line to mean that the whole cast of characters who betrayed Jesus that night and that day would have acted better if they knew he was the Messiah. And, yes, that’s one way to read it. But it's an easy way. One that lets us off the hook. One that doesn't require us to forgive.
So here’s another. Bernard Shaw’s play St. Joan has a character in it, an English chaplain, who is delighted when Joan is captured. He argues against the Church authorities’ efforts to get her to confess and recant, and wants to see her tried and executed as a heretic.
And, after he gets his wish, and she’s sentenced to death, he goes to watch.
He comes back, a broken man, and says:
He knows what he has done, all too late.
Like Peter, like Judas, perhaps even like Pilate. Like Paul in , when the scales fall from his eyes. Only afterwards do they understand the enormity of what they have done.
And not just because Jesus was the Messiah. Because they have, in betraying Jesus, betrayed what was best in them.
As we do, as I do, when we burn bright with self-righteousness at the terrible things that happen in our poor world, and give ourselves permission to hate whoever we think is responsible for them, to deny their humanity. As we do, as I do, when we feel that wonderful sense of justified anger, and give into it. As we do, as I do, when we accept an unjust status quo, and convince ourselves that there is nothing to be done. That so the world is, when in fact it is so we have made the world.
Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
When I graduated law school, my parents took my sister and me to England, the one place I had always wanted to visit. My mother worked for a travel agency, and we were on a bus tour of England and Scotland. We stopped at Oxford for a day, and Cambridge. We saw Stonehenge, and the moors where the Hound of the Baskervilles hunted.
One day, we visited Coventry, and pulled up in front of a very modern, frankly not all that impressive cathedral. As we piled off the bus, I wondered why we were even stopping there. As we went around, I saw why.
The outer walls of the old cathedral, a medieval masterpiece, had survived the bombing of the cathedral in November 1940, the height of the blitz. Nothing else had, mind you. The windows, gone, the roof, fallen in. Utter devastation. And not just the Cathedral.
That night, 568 people were killed; approximately 1200 people were injured, 863 of them seriously. Nearly 8,000 houses were either destroyed outright or required evacuation for repair.
The next day, Richard Howard, the Provost of the Cathedral, chalked on the wall of the ruined sanctuary the words “Father, Forgive.”
Later, when it was safe to inspect the still smoldering ruin, the cathedral stonemason, Jock Forbes, found two of the roofbeams, still linked, charred and twisted though they were, forming a cross. Forbes set the beams up behind an altar made from the rubble. Our tour guide told us that the first service said was for the souls of the German pilots, as well as for those killed in the air raid.
The altar read simply, “Father, Forgive.”
As I stood in the middle of that ruined cathedral, long after the others wandered into the shiny new one, I couldn’t take my eyes of that cross, off that inscription.
“Father, Forgive.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off it because I had only recently read that in late 1940, the threat of invasion still loomed over England. And that, if a beachhead were established by that invasion, “all would be lost, for it is a peculiarity of England’s island that its southern weald is indefensible against disciplined troops.”
With their cathedral and a large parts of the City destroyed, who could blame the people of Coventry if they wanted revenge? Or even if they just wanted safety, and the defeat of the invaders. But they forgave.
And this act of forgiveness was not done after the fact, from a position of safety. In fact, the people of Coventry forgave their attackers even when the forces of evil looked to be poised to triumph over them. The prayed for their attackers to be forgiven when it looked like the damage was not just incalculable, but irreparable. They forgave when it seemed that all was lost.
A few weeks later, on Christmas Day, Provost Howard of the Cathedral spoke over the radio from the ruins. He asked those who were listening “to banish all thoughts of revenge” and called on them to “make a kinder, simpler world—a more Christ-Child like world.”
We’re a long way from that kinder, simpler world Richard Howard prayed for on that Christmas Day here, this afternoon. Even though Lent started so early, this year, it feels further away from Christmas than I would have thought possible.
No, we’re here on Good Friday 2016. Just three days after a terror attack in Brussels on Tuesday claimed at least 30 lives.
And here we are, in the shadow of the Cross.
“Father, forgive them, for they know what they do.”
How hard it is to say those words with anything like conviction. It’s like that part of the Lord’s Prayer, when we ask God to forgive us for the hurts we inflict, just like we forgive the people who have hurt us. I don’t always say that part of the prayer with the intentionality it deserves.
But Jesus did. And Jesus does.
Maybe it’s because He knows us better than we know ourselves, and is able to understand how easy it is to fool ourselves into the worst betrayals, the worst crimes. After all, Peter has denied him out of fear, Judas has sold him for profit, the Temple authorities have betrayed him to the Romans, and the Romans—well, imagine the betrayal of finding in the occupier of your nation someone who gets it, knows that you’re not guilty, and then, as a matter of politics, sends you to death anyway.
And yet, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
In my Catholic boyhood, I was taught to understand that line to mean that the whole cast of characters who betrayed Jesus that night and that day would have acted better if they knew he was the Messiah. And, yes, that’s one way to read it. But it's an easy way. One that lets us off the hook. One that doesn't require us to forgive.
So here’s another. Bernard Shaw’s play St. Joan has a character in it, an English chaplain, who is delighted when Joan is captured. He argues against the Church authorities’ efforts to get her to confess and recant, and wants to see her tried and executed as a heretic.
And, after he gets his wish, and she’s sentenced to death, he goes to watch.
He comes back, a broken man, and says:
You don't know: you haven’t seen: it is so easy to talk when you don’t know. You madden yourself with words: you damn yourself because it feels grand to throw oil on the flaming hell of your own temper. But when it is brought home to you; when you see the thing you have done; when it is blinding your eyes, stifling your nostrils, tearing your heart, then--then--The chaplain can’t finish the sentence, the enormity of his own guilt is too much for him. He has realized what his own self-righteousness has helped bring about, and his heart is shattered at the pain he has caused.
He knows what he has done, all too late.
Like Peter, like Judas, perhaps even like Pilate. Like Paul in , when the scales fall from his eyes. Only afterwards do they understand the enormity of what they have done.
And not just because Jesus was the Messiah. Because they have, in betraying Jesus, betrayed what was best in them.
As we do, as I do, when we burn bright with self-righteousness at the terrible things that happen in our poor world, and give ourselves permission to hate whoever we think is responsible for them, to deny their humanity. As we do, as I do, when we feel that wonderful sense of justified anger, and give into it. As we do, as I do, when we accept an unjust status quo, and convince ourselves that there is nothing to be done. That so the world is, when in fact it is so we have made the world.
Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.
Sunday, February 28, 2016
“I Wonder What They Meant?” A Sermon on Luke 13: 1-9
(Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church February 28, 2016)
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Well, this Gospel is a fire and brimstone sermon in the making, right?
You know those Galileans whose blood Herod mixed with their sacrifices? Not especially bad people. Sorry. We’re not off the hook.
Hey, those 18 people in Jerusalem, who were crushed when the tower of Siloam fell on them?
Nope, not evildoers. Not especially, anyway.
Just plain folks, you could say.
And unless you repent—well, it could happen to you. In fact, strike the could. It will happen to you. Because we’re all going to die, one day.
Feeling good yet?
Didn’t think so.
This is one of the famous “hard sayings” of Jesus. It’s hard because it’s flinty, tough minded, unpleasant. It’s hard because it’s hard to bear. It’s hard because we don’t recognize the Jesus we love in this story.
This sounds like John the Baptist in one of his less friendly moods. It sounds very punitive. Very judge-y. Where’s that “friend of sinners” when we need him?
But then Jesus moves into the parable, so relief is at hand, we think. So the fig tree is, once again, barren. That’s three years in a row! And the owner tells the gardener to cut it down. It’s a waste of soil.
But the Gardener intercedes for the tree—“Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”
Well, that’s a relief. Stay of execution. I was feeling nervous there—hey wait a second. The Gardener is only asking for one last chance. One last chance for the tree to show its value, to become a good useful tree. And if not—cut it down.
Jesus’s parable and response to the bad news about his fellow Galileans is to call his listeners to repent.
Now think about that for a second. Jesus has just been told about an atrocity—the Galileans weren’t just killed; their blood was used to profane the altar, making their religious sacrifices a kind of human sacrifice—the very kind of sacrifice the Hebrew Scriptures condemn the worship of Moloch and the Baals for. It was an atrocity in a holy place.
The closest modern parallel I can think of is the shooting in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last June, in Charleston South Carolina.
And in the wake of this atrocity, Jesus calls his listeners—friends and maybe even family members of the victims—to repent.
I had to wrestle with this Gospel, I admit it. And when something bubbled up from my subconscious, it was a question, from an old Leonard Cohen song, of all things. Here’s the question:
When they said,
Repent.
Repent.
Repent.
I wonder what they meant?
But what does repentance mean? The term in the Gospel is metanoia, which translates as “to think differently after,” or “to change one’s mind”
That doesn’t get us very far, though. Does the Gospel reading help us any more? We don’t know how Jesus’s listeners reacted. We don’t know much about the murdered Galileans, cut down in a holy place, their deaths used to pollute something sacred.
But we have a glimpse into what Jesus may mean here from the reaction of the worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and their families: They forgave the young man, twisted with hate, whom they had welcomed into their spiritual home, and who betrayed their welcome, killing nine of their brothers and sisters.
The church community forgave him anyway.
What does repentance look like?
A lot like forgiveness, if you look closely.
Both require us to make the effort to see the people who have hurt us not just through the lens of the pain they’ve inflicted on us, or those we love. When we do that, we’re repenting, in a very real way. We’re re-thinking. Going past the anger, to see the situation in the round. Forgiveness is the mirror image of repentance—they both require us to look beyond ourselves.
But let’s not complicate it.
Repentance is just a fancy word for changing your mind. [1]
Let me give you an example—the one that caught my attention.
I once knew a woman who had a terminal diagnosis. Stage 4 cancer. She could have drowned in self-pity, or just let other people look after her. Instead, she took a long hard look at her life. And she realized that she’d hurt a lot of the people she loved. She’s been tough, critical, sometimes even cruel. So she got busy. She reached out to the people she had hurt, the friends she’d driven away, the children she’d made afraid of her.
She apologized. But even more, she made amends. She did her best to help each of the people she’d harmed to start healing from the damage she’d done. She repaired the damaged relationships in her life, to the best of her ability. And in doing so, she discovered a happiness that eluded her in health.
Repentance isn’t easy. It takes up 4 of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. First, sober alcoholics make a searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves—that’s the Fourth Step.
Then—and here’s the first hard bit—then, comes admitting to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. That’s the Fifth Step.
By the way, the shocking part of the Fifth Step is that all the secrets we find so unspeakable—they’re always old news to your sponsor, or, if you try this in the sacrament of reconciliation, to the confessor. The harder it is for us to say, generally, the more used to it a confessor, a sponsor or a therapist is.
Then after coming to terms with ourselves, and laying it all before God, come the next hurdle. The Eighth Step requires alcoholics to make a list of all persons we had harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all. Not to actually make the amends yet—just to become willing.
The actual amends come in the Ninth Step. That’s making direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. So, when we can, without causing more damage to them or someone else, try to put right what went wrong—do so. When it can’t be done, pray for the person we’ve harmed, and do something concrete, maybe help someone in a similar situation. The Ninth Step can be humiliating, especially when those who have been harmed aren’t ready to forgive. But at the end of it, the burdens of the past are gone. If the relationship that was injured is still dead, at least there’s been an effort at closure and reconciliation. To end it well.
Now why did I take you through that?
Because it’s a blueprint—one of several—for repentance without self-hatred. Repentance isn’t about self-loathing; it’s about coming to terms with ourselves, strengths and weaknesses, and recognizing the shadow side of ourselves—and forgiving him or her. And then moving on.
And we all need to do it, because we’re none of us perfect. Every one of us can reach out today to someone we love but haven’t kept up with, or to repair a broken tie. Repentance means fixing little things as well as big; we don’t have to be the notorious sinner St. Augustine was, or St. Paul, who persecuted the Early Church, in order to correct the things that lie on our hearts.
Oh, no fire and brimstone yet. Well, we still have the threat of death, or of being cut down like the fig tree if it doesn’t turn it around. So God is still pretty scary, right?
Oh, come on. Of course we’re all going to die. Everyone is mortal, so we’re all going to die. That’s the very point Jesus is making. Bad things happen to good people. It doesn’t matter that those Galileans weren’t terrible sinners; they died anyway. Same thing with the people crushed in the tower collapse.
Jesus is rejecting a type of thinking called theodicy—the effort to get God off the hook for the problem of suffering. He’s rejecting the Psalmist’s contention that the good will live in and inherit the land, while the wicked will be swept away. He’s pointing out that life and death are mysteries, and the story doesn’t end in a satisfying way. If you treat it as a story, that is.
But it’s not a story. The end isn’t going to be aesthetically satisfying, with sweeping theme music. It’s just as likely to be a sudden surprise.
What Jesus is saying is that we none of us know how much time we have. Every day is a chance to take the steps toward reconciliation, and living in wholeness with those we love. And we don’t know how many of those chances we get.
So repent.
Repent.
Repent.
It just means changing your mind.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
****
[1] Yes, I ripped off Steven Moffat. Get over it.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Well, this Gospel is a fire and brimstone sermon in the making, right?
You know those Galileans whose blood Herod mixed with their sacrifices? Not especially bad people. Sorry. We’re not off the hook.
Hey, those 18 people in Jerusalem, who were crushed when the tower of Siloam fell on them?
Nope, not evildoers. Not especially, anyway.
Just plain folks, you could say.
And unless you repent—well, it could happen to you. In fact, strike the could. It will happen to you. Because we’re all going to die, one day.
Feeling good yet?
Didn’t think so.
This is one of the famous “hard sayings” of Jesus. It’s hard because it’s flinty, tough minded, unpleasant. It’s hard because it’s hard to bear. It’s hard because we don’t recognize the Jesus we love in this story.
This sounds like John the Baptist in one of his less friendly moods. It sounds very punitive. Very judge-y. Where’s that “friend of sinners” when we need him?
But then Jesus moves into the parable, so relief is at hand, we think. So the fig tree is, once again, barren. That’s three years in a row! And the owner tells the gardener to cut it down. It’s a waste of soil.
But the Gardener intercedes for the tree—“Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”
Well, that’s a relief. Stay of execution. I was feeling nervous there—hey wait a second. The Gardener is only asking for one last chance. One last chance for the tree to show its value, to become a good useful tree. And if not—cut it down.
Jesus’s parable and response to the bad news about his fellow Galileans is to call his listeners to repent.
Now think about that for a second. Jesus has just been told about an atrocity—the Galileans weren’t just killed; their blood was used to profane the altar, making their religious sacrifices a kind of human sacrifice—the very kind of sacrifice the Hebrew Scriptures condemn the worship of Moloch and the Baals for. It was an atrocity in a holy place.
The closest modern parallel I can think of is the shooting in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last June, in Charleston South Carolina.
And in the wake of this atrocity, Jesus calls his listeners—friends and maybe even family members of the victims—to repent.
I had to wrestle with this Gospel, I admit it. And when something bubbled up from my subconscious, it was a question, from an old Leonard Cohen song, of all things. Here’s the question:
When they said,
Repent.
Repent.
Repent.
I wonder what they meant?
But what does repentance mean? The term in the Gospel is metanoia, which translates as “to think differently after,” or “to change one’s mind”
That doesn’t get us very far, though. Does the Gospel reading help us any more? We don’t know how Jesus’s listeners reacted. We don’t know much about the murdered Galileans, cut down in a holy place, their deaths used to pollute something sacred.
But we have a glimpse into what Jesus may mean here from the reaction of the worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and their families: They forgave the young man, twisted with hate, whom they had welcomed into their spiritual home, and who betrayed their welcome, killing nine of their brothers and sisters.
The church community forgave him anyway.
What does repentance look like?
A lot like forgiveness, if you look closely.
Both require us to make the effort to see the people who have hurt us not just through the lens of the pain they’ve inflicted on us, or those we love. When we do that, we’re repenting, in a very real way. We’re re-thinking. Going past the anger, to see the situation in the round. Forgiveness is the mirror image of repentance—they both require us to look beyond ourselves.
But let’s not complicate it.
Repentance is just a fancy word for changing your mind. [1]
Let me give you an example—the one that caught my attention.
I once knew a woman who had a terminal diagnosis. Stage 4 cancer. She could have drowned in self-pity, or just let other people look after her. Instead, she took a long hard look at her life. And she realized that she’d hurt a lot of the people she loved. She’s been tough, critical, sometimes even cruel. So she got busy. She reached out to the people she had hurt, the friends she’d driven away, the children she’d made afraid of her.
She apologized. But even more, she made amends. She did her best to help each of the people she’d harmed to start healing from the damage she’d done. She repaired the damaged relationships in her life, to the best of her ability. And in doing so, she discovered a happiness that eluded her in health.
Repentance isn’t easy. It takes up 4 of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. First, sober alcoholics make a searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves—that’s the Fourth Step.
Then—and here’s the first hard bit—then, comes admitting to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. That’s the Fifth Step.
By the way, the shocking part of the Fifth Step is that all the secrets we find so unspeakable—they’re always old news to your sponsor, or, if you try this in the sacrament of reconciliation, to the confessor. The harder it is for us to say, generally, the more used to it a confessor, a sponsor or a therapist is.
Then after coming to terms with ourselves, and laying it all before God, come the next hurdle. The Eighth Step requires alcoholics to make a list of all persons we had harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all. Not to actually make the amends yet—just to become willing.
The actual amends come in the Ninth Step. That’s making direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. So, when we can, without causing more damage to them or someone else, try to put right what went wrong—do so. When it can’t be done, pray for the person we’ve harmed, and do something concrete, maybe help someone in a similar situation. The Ninth Step can be humiliating, especially when those who have been harmed aren’t ready to forgive. But at the end of it, the burdens of the past are gone. If the relationship that was injured is still dead, at least there’s been an effort at closure and reconciliation. To end it well.
Now why did I take you through that?
Because it’s a blueprint—one of several—for repentance without self-hatred. Repentance isn’t about self-loathing; it’s about coming to terms with ourselves, strengths and weaknesses, and recognizing the shadow side of ourselves—and forgiving him or her. And then moving on.
And we all need to do it, because we’re none of us perfect. Every one of us can reach out today to someone we love but haven’t kept up with, or to repair a broken tie. Repentance means fixing little things as well as big; we don’t have to be the notorious sinner St. Augustine was, or St. Paul, who persecuted the Early Church, in order to correct the things that lie on our hearts.
Oh, no fire and brimstone yet. Well, we still have the threat of death, or of being cut down like the fig tree if it doesn’t turn it around. So God is still pretty scary, right?
Oh, come on. Of course we’re all going to die. Everyone is mortal, so we’re all going to die. That’s the very point Jesus is making. Bad things happen to good people. It doesn’t matter that those Galileans weren’t terrible sinners; they died anyway. Same thing with the people crushed in the tower collapse.
Jesus is rejecting a type of thinking called theodicy—the effort to get God off the hook for the problem of suffering. He’s rejecting the Psalmist’s contention that the good will live in and inherit the land, while the wicked will be swept away. He’s pointing out that life and death are mysteries, and the story doesn’t end in a satisfying way. If you treat it as a story, that is.
But it’s not a story. The end isn’t going to be aesthetically satisfying, with sweeping theme music. It’s just as likely to be a sudden surprise.
What Jesus is saying is that we none of us know how much time we have. Every day is a chance to take the steps toward reconciliation, and living in wholeness with those we love. And we don’t know how many of those chances we get.
So repent.
Repent.
Repent.
It just means changing your mind.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
****
[1] Yes, I ripped off Steven Moffat. Get over it.
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Restorative Justice Redux
In view of my speaking this coming Sunday at the St. Barts Forum on Reconciliation, I thought I'd share a post from three years ago:
I think the hardest teaching in the Gospels is Jesus's telling us to love our enemies. It's so easy, as Bernard Shaw pointed out, to "throw oil on the flaming hell of your own temper" and hate. In politics, in religion, in life. Even in intramural civil disputes over property in the Anglican Wars, I've seen each side treat the other treated as not fellow Christians with whom relationships have broken down, but with contempt as bigoted schismatics on the one hand and as libertine emissaries of Lucifer on the other. I have sometimes been guilty of this myself; I have a quick temper and years as a litigator have sharpened my ability to jab or cut with words.
Last week, I was profoundly touched by an article in the New york Times about restorative justice in criminal law; Andy and Kate Grosmaire (Andy is, like me, a postulant for the diaconate in the Episcopal Church)initiated a restorative justice process with the family of their daughter's fiancé, who had murdered her in an argument, and which, thanks to a prosecuting attorney who was willing to try the process, resulted in a surprising degree of healing and reconciliation. Even in cases as serious as murder, other examples can be found.
As the author, almost 20 years ago, of a study of dismissing criminal cases in the interests of justice, I have long hoped that my ministry would encompass trying to bring reconciliation between offenders and the larger society. What I have read on restorative justice in following up on the article about the Grosmaires seems to point a way forward to me. And then, of course, I read about the horrific murder of my law school classmate, Theresa Gorski. I was, simply, shocked. I still am, I think. I asked my church to put Theresa and her children on the prayer list--but I couldn't bring myself to add her husband, Christopher Howson,who is accused of her murder.
I once wrote that we are none of reducible to our worst moments. I believe this with all of my heart, mind, and soul. Andy and Kate Grosmaire, in the worst of circumstances, saw this, and were able to bring themselves to forgive the man who had killed his beloved daughter. That is living one's faith in the most extraordinary way. And it's necessary for healing, and to bring healing.
I'm not saying that, if I were so tested, I could do what the Grosmaires did, what Sharletta Evans did. I hope I never am so tested--save me from the time of trial, indeed--but I can try to apply the lesson demonstrated so heroically by them in my own way.
Pray for Theresa, and her children. Pray for Christopher. Pray for all whose lives were shattered by this horror, and all similarly situated. And, in conflicts great and small, try to remember the humanity of those who hurt me--and hope that those I offend do the same for me. A bit late for a New Year's Resolution, perhaps, but I think that's the one for me. That, and continue exploring the world of restorative justice, to see where I may be led.
***
February 24, 2016: Since I first published this post, I have been looking into restorative justice, and Vera Institute and the the New York Peace Institute (to name but two) in New York City, and the Center for Community Justice in Schenectady, provide opportunities to train, to volunteer and to participate in the hard, but critical work of reconciliation.
As I grow into my calling, I find that the work of reconciliation calls to me in a way that gets beyond my experience as a litigator over more than 20 years. Not to disparage the utility of litigation--but where reconciliation can be achieved, it forms a more full, lasting resolution than any imposed result can. That's a lesson I've learned in my decade now as a labor neutral.
Or, as Winston Churchill famously put it, "Jaw-jaw is better than war-war."
I think the hardest teaching in the Gospels is Jesus's telling us to love our enemies. It's so easy, as Bernard Shaw pointed out, to "throw oil on the flaming hell of your own temper" and hate. In politics, in religion, in life. Even in intramural civil disputes over property in the Anglican Wars, I've seen each side treat the other treated as not fellow Christians with whom relationships have broken down, but with contempt as bigoted schismatics on the one hand and as libertine emissaries of Lucifer on the other. I have sometimes been guilty of this myself; I have a quick temper and years as a litigator have sharpened my ability to jab or cut with words.
Last week, I was profoundly touched by an article in the New york Times about restorative justice in criminal law; Andy and Kate Grosmaire (Andy is, like me, a postulant for the diaconate in the Episcopal Church)initiated a restorative justice process with the family of their daughter's fiancé, who had murdered her in an argument, and which, thanks to a prosecuting attorney who was willing to try the process, resulted in a surprising degree of healing and reconciliation. Even in cases as serious as murder, other examples can be found.
As the author, almost 20 years ago, of a study of dismissing criminal cases in the interests of justice, I have long hoped that my ministry would encompass trying to bring reconciliation between offenders and the larger society. What I have read on restorative justice in following up on the article about the Grosmaires seems to point a way forward to me. And then, of course, I read about the horrific murder of my law school classmate, Theresa Gorski. I was, simply, shocked. I still am, I think. I asked my church to put Theresa and her children on the prayer list--but I couldn't bring myself to add her husband, Christopher Howson,who is accused of her murder.
I once wrote that we are none of reducible to our worst moments. I believe this with all of my heart, mind, and soul. Andy and Kate Grosmaire, in the worst of circumstances, saw this, and were able to bring themselves to forgive the man who had killed his beloved daughter. That is living one's faith in the most extraordinary way. And it's necessary for healing, and to bring healing.
I'm not saying that, if I were so tested, I could do what the Grosmaires did, what Sharletta Evans did. I hope I never am so tested--save me from the time of trial, indeed--but I can try to apply the lesson demonstrated so heroically by them in my own way.
Pray for Theresa, and her children. Pray for Christopher. Pray for all whose lives were shattered by this horror, and all similarly situated. And, in conflicts great and small, try to remember the humanity of those who hurt me--and hope that those I offend do the same for me. A bit late for a New Year's Resolution, perhaps, but I think that's the one for me. That, and continue exploring the world of restorative justice, to see where I may be led.
***
February 24, 2016: Since I first published this post, I have been looking into restorative justice, and Vera Institute and the the New York Peace Institute (to name but two) in New York City, and the Center for Community Justice in Schenectady, provide opportunities to train, to volunteer and to participate in the hard, but critical work of reconciliation.
As I grow into my calling, I find that the work of reconciliation calls to me in a way that gets beyond my experience as a litigator over more than 20 years. Not to disparage the utility of litigation--but where reconciliation can be achieved, it forms a more full, lasting resolution than any imposed result can. That's a lesson I've learned in my decade now as a labor neutral.
Or, as Winston Churchill famously put it, "Jaw-jaw is better than war-war."
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Turn and Face the Strange: A Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday
[Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church on February 7, 2016]
[This sermon is one where I went "off book" for a little bit, and so my notes don't perfectly reflect the text as delivered. I've amended it to reflect what I said, to the best of my recollection, while I'm pretty sure all the concepts are there, it's not verbatim.]
So, you heard it right. Jesus goes up the mountain to pray, and then—something happens.
Something that is hard even for Luke to describe—the best he can come up with is to say that “while [Jesus] was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.” Matthew is a little more explicit—Jesus’s face “shone like the sun.” [1] Mark adds that Jesus’s clothes became “dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.” [2]
In reading these three tellings of the Transfiguration, it’s pretty clear that the Gospel writers are reaching for a way to capture the experience, and not quite succeeding. They don’t know how to put into words the sheer unearthliness of what happens to Peter, John, and James on the mountaintop with Jesus. It’s like trying to catch lightning in a bottle.
But they try to convey this experience for which there are no words—so Jesus’s face just alters, or it shines like the sun, his clothes are whiter than possible on earth. They’re grasping for metaphors to tell us that Jesus the teacher, the rabbi, the wise man, became suddenly very, very Other.
And if that’s not enough, Moses and Elijah appear, talking with Jesus. Not only are these two of the greatest figures in the Hebrew Bible—the lawgiver and the archetype of the prophet—but they’re both figures who were more than a little uncanny, a little unearthly themselves.
Moses, who after he received the tablets of the Law directly from God, came down from the Mountain unaware that his face was shining with an unearthly radiance [3], and that people could only speak to him if he wore a veil; Elijah, who was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire.[4]
Peter, John, and James are exhilarated and terrified, and frankly who can blame them? Only Peter tries to do anything, and I have to admit, his effort to be helpful—“Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah"—sound like it’s right out of as Woody Allen movie. But at least he tries to be a part of what’s happening.
A mysterious cloud covers the mountain, and a voice is heard, saying “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”
And then it’s all over.
No Moses, no Elijah, Jesus back to normal, no booths for Peter to build.
So they go down the mountain, and rejoin the others.
***
I could take the easy way out of this story. “Oh, it’s a glimpse of heaven,” I could say, or “what a vivid metaphor. Let’s unpack it.”
But I can’t really do that here, not and be honest with you.
Because this story is so strange, that I think it has a kind of truth that the Gospel writers are struggling to articulate, and only imperfectly succeeding at, and if I use their struggle to domesticate the story, I’m smothering that truth.
So I’m going to do something different. I’m going to invite you to, in the words of the late David Bowie, “turn and face the strange.”
Something happened. What was it?
We’re handicapped by the fact that we live in a scientific, empirical age. We live by science and technology and it’s enriched our lives in many ways. But, it’s like Lawrence and Lee wrote in Inherit the Wind: progress has never been a bargain; you’ve got to pay for it. They say that it’s as if there’s a man behind a counter who says “all right, you can have a telephone, but you’ll have to give up privacy, the charm of distance. Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder, and the air will smell of gasoline!”[5]
And Lawrence and Lee are right.
As a culture, we have lost the sense that the ordinary can transcend itself, that in day-to-day life, there can be moments when the light gets brighter, the air is alive with currents and motes tumbling through sunbeams, and our hearts beat just a bit faster. They come out of nowhere, little moments that we can treasure, or dismiss as a fleeting feeling.
Back in 2011, I had one of those moments in this very church—next door, actually in the main sanctuary. I was sitting in the congregation as the choir sang a new piece of music, Evan Solot’s The Hawk, and suddenly—well, I was a little bit more alive. The music had set something free in me. I felt, in that moment, serene, centered, and at one with my Creator.
That’s not normal for me.
It’s not normal for most of us, I suspect, but many people have moments when they are pulled into alignment with the universe; some have experiences that are even more striking, harder to ignore.
These experiences are common enough to have been studied by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who called them “peak experiences.” He believed that all people were capable of having them.
In the Church, we would call these mystical experiences, and the 19th Century scholar William Inge wrote that the mystical facility is one which everybody has but which few develop. But the lives of the mystics, from Julian of Norwich to Thomas Merton, have shown us that these experiences aren’t to be written off lightly. They’re not nothing.
In the ancient world people were far more open to these experiences than we moderns are. They write of them without embarrassment, without doubt. They have not called into question their own experiences.
But the Transfiguration isn’t a subtle little intimation of immortality, or an ordinary peak experience. It’s much more dramatic, much bigger, and shared—it’s not just Peter, or John, or James alone who experiences it, or even Jesus—it’s all of them. It has a reality to it that transcends any physical or psychological explanation for its cause.
And it’s not just a feel good moment. It’s terrifying as well as exhilarating, until the voice speaks and it all just ends. But the disciples remember. They remember well enough that slightly different accounts of the experience appear in 3 out of the 4 Gospels.
But the really important part is what happens next.
They come down from the mountain, and rejoin the day-to-day world.
In today’s reading from Second Corinthians, Paul references Moses’s transfiguration, and that veil he wore. Paul tells us that “when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed,” and that “all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” Paul tells us that “since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.”
Well, that’s self-explanatory, right?
But wait—Paul is comparing us to Moses, as well as to his followers wandering in the desert.
Catch that thought for a second: we are both the viewer and the viewed, only without the need for any veil. By walking the Way—which is what the early Christians called their faith, because it is a way of life and not a set of doctrinal principles—we are like Moses, being with God on the mountaintop.
Like Moses, we are changed by our engagement with God, and not just once, but daily, even if we don’t realize it ourselves, just as Moses didn’t until the people hid from his altered face. It’s like C.S. Lewis wrote, that if we are really walking the Way, then, taking our lives as a whole, with all our innumerable choices, all our lives long we are slowly turning the central part of us, the part that chooses, into a creature in harmony with God, with others, and with ourselves. Or, like Dorian Gray, we can choose another path—but those choices will, one at a time, change us, too, even though we might not notice the changes until they accumulate.
Turn and face the strange. Because those choices? They do accumulate. We change, even though we don’t see it daily. So do others around us. We can see Transfiguration in those moments when we see the reality that underlies the workaday appearances of those we love, those who have blessed our lives. Maybe that’s when the beauty that isn’t evident is perceived, and we’re shocked by the glimpse of a level of reality we don’t often grasp. And that if we respond to that insight, we can respond to that beauty, respond to those changes.
Lent is coming in just a few days, and often we dread it. The solemnity, the penitential rites. We miss our alleluias. But Lent can be a mountaintop experience, too. You don’t have to put away something you love for Lent. You can pick something up instead. Try something new to change your perspective. Add a short daily prayer from the Book of Common Prayer’s Daily Office. If you do that already, try a different from of daily prayer. Me? This year I’m changing my usual Rite II daily prayer for an older from. Why? The unfamiliar language makes me think more about what I’m praying, and what it means. But that’s me. There are as many different ways of shaking up spiritual practices as there are people. The whole point is to give the kaleidoscope a twist, in the hope that all the shapes will reform, and give you a glimpse of a new perspective.
And heartened by the glimpse we come down from the mountain, like the disciples. We rejoin the swim of life, but participate in a new way. Restored, refreshed, encouraged.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
1. Matt 17: 2.
2. Mark 9: 2-3
3. Exodus 34: 29-30.
4. 2 Kings 2: 11.
5. Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee, Inherit the Wind (1955), at 93.
Monday, January 11, 2016
“You are my Son, the Beloved; with You I am Well Pleased." A Sermon for 1 Epiphany
(Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church, NYC, Sunday, January 10, 2016)
The thing that people forget all too often is that John the Baptist was a very big deal. The ancient historian Flavius Josephus, who is one of the few non-Christian sources about Jesus or John had been led the resistance to Rome in Galilee until he was defeated, and then became a historian explaining the history and customs of Israel to Roman readers. Josephus spends more time on John than he does on Jesus. (In fact, Jesus is described first, 2 chapters ahead of John, which could lead the reader to assume that Jesus died before John the Baptist.)
John’s ministry is described, as is Herod’s fear that John’s influence had grown to the point that the people might follow John in a rebellion and sweep away Herod’s regime. Josephus tells us of John’s imprisonment at Machreus (which we know was used as a prison at the time), and his death at the Herod’s command are also described. No Salome and her dance—just a cold calculation by a wily monarch willing to kill the innocent John on the off chance that he posed a danger to Herod’s reign.
Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like the King Herod in the Christmas story, seeking to lure the Magi into betraying the infant Jesus’s location so that Herod could kill him. According to Josephus, the people believed that Herod’s defeat by Aretus IV in 36 AD was God’s punishment for murdering John.
Jesus gets a passage that is shorter when you take out the sentences that were obviously added by later Christian copyists. Jospehus, a Hellenistic follower of Judaism, was not going to write of Jesus: “He was the Son of God!” In the authentic passage, Jesus is described as “a wise man who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly.” His trial under Pilate and crucifixion are noted, and the continued loyalty of his friends after his death. That’s it.
So, if we’re judging by a historian writing 60 years after they both died, John the Baptist is the slightly bigger name, the more important figure. His death is even avenged by God, unlike Jesus’s death. That’s how it looked at the time Josephus wrote—which incidentally is about the time that most scholars believe the last written gospel, the Gospel According to John was written.
But according to the Gospels, John knows better. Today, we hear Luke describe Jesus as “one who is more powerful than I” and even says that he is “not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.” In the Fourth Gospel, John sees the Holy Spirit rest on Jesus at his baptism, and hails him as the Messiah. In all of the Gospels, , John knows that he is not the Messiah, but is here to awaken the world to his coming.
So John gets it. He’s the overture, not the main drama.
And unlike the historian Flavius Josephus, John gets it right. There is still a sect that claims John the Baptist as its chief prophet, the Mandaeans, but Christianity grew to be a truly world-wide religion.
Why? Why Jesus and not John the Baptist? It’s easy now to look at the question through the lens of Christian history and our own faith commitments, but what accounts for the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire like wildfire over a John the Baptist inspired call to repentance and good works? They both taught the same basic ethical lessons—John is described as teaching those who come to him for baptism to take no more than their due, not extort others, to show mercy—they both used baptism to mark the redemption of the initiate, the forgiveness of sins, and called sinners to repent and accept forgiveness.
So why did people choose Jesus?
I think it’s the fact that Jesus met people where they were. John made it hard, didn’t he? You had to go out to the desert to find him, and his welcome wasn’t exactly very warm. I mean, the Pharisees and Saducees make the trip, and he greets them with “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”[1]
What could be more cozy?
Jesus, on the other hand, sees Zacchaeus, a short tax-collector, who has climbed into a tree just to get a look at him as Jesus comes into town, and calls out to him, inviting himself to dinner. The crowd murmurs. After all, Zacchaeus is a notable sinner. But Zacchaeus is so overjoyed that Jesus wants to spend time with him, that he announces that he will give away half of what he owns, and give back 4 times any amount he has unfairly taken from anybody.
Jesus didn’t ask him to do that. He just came to dinner. He accepted Zacchaeus as a peer, a friend, and made Zacchaeus want to live up to Jesus’s estimate of him.
It’s the same way with the unnamed woman, described only as a “woman of the city” and a sinner, who anoints Jesus’s feet with expensive ointment and dries them with her hair. It’s a shocking moment of intimacy even now when we first read it in Luke’s Gospel, but even more so when we consider that it occurs between Jesus and a woman who would have been viewed as polluting him by her touch.
Nobody confronts Jesus about it, Simon, his host, assumes that Jesus would know better if he were a true prophet. Jesus defends the woman, pointing out that her welcome made up for the deficiencies in Simon’s own treatment of him, and praises her for the great love she has shown, in gratitude for the forgiveness she has received—which she understands has been given to her without her even asking!
Jesus even points out the difference in his approach from John’s, in criticizing the crowd that rejected them both: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’”
I recently attended a two day workshop with the Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber. In one of the sessions she described herself as a “Law and Grace preacher.” By that she meant that she saw a very great danger in our tendency to want to prove ourselves to be good people by our complying with the law. She explained that the idea that we’re good enough that all we need is a handbook to follow would mean that we wouldn’t have to bother God with all the stuff about ourselves we’d rather not face. We could just be good. The problem is, Jesus doesn’t buy that. Nobody can live up to the law—it would mean being perfect as our heavenly father is perfect. The law, Nadia said, is a lover who will never love us back.
That’s John the Baptist, in a way. John has been called the last prophet of the Old Testament, and there’s a lot of truth in that, because, although he offers a route to the forgiveness of sins, he carries the burden of the law. He expected Jesus to be like him, with his winnowing fork and with fire.
But Jesus set us free from that burden. Don’t believe me? That Pharisee of Pharisees, as St. Paul called himself, says just that in his letter to the Galatians: “we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.”
In my Roman Catholic boyhood, we used to keep a sort of moral score. Had we sinned badly enough that our venial (not all that serious) sins could add up to a mortal sin (uh-oh!)? Were our spiritual bank accounts overdrawn, or did we have a balance with God?
We don’t have a spiritual checkbook, of course. That’s not God’s way.
Jesus’s way is the way of Grace. Jesus met people where they were, and didn’t judge them—and by meeting them with love opened up new worlds of possibility for them. He changed how they saw themselves, and what they were capable of being. We don’t become perfect, but we meet love with love. And even our failures are transformed by the fact that we are free to love back, instead of trying to impress a strict legal guardian.
We can pass on that gift in our own way. “Judge not, that ye be not judged” isn’t just safer, it gives the people we interact with the chance to respond to us in a less defensive way, to see themselves through our eyes as people worth knowing and caring about as they are, not as we’d like them to be. That’s our part in grace. Pass it on. Love and forgive. And when we can’t, remember that God will do it for us until we can do it ourselves.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
[1] Matt. 3: 7-8.
[2] Matt. 11: 18-19.
[3] Gal. 2:16.
The thing that people forget all too often is that John the Baptist was a very big deal. The ancient historian Flavius Josephus, who is one of the few non-Christian sources about Jesus or John had been led the resistance to Rome in Galilee until he was defeated, and then became a historian explaining the history and customs of Israel to Roman readers. Josephus spends more time on John than he does on Jesus. (In fact, Jesus is described first, 2 chapters ahead of John, which could lead the reader to assume that Jesus died before John the Baptist.)
John’s ministry is described, as is Herod’s fear that John’s influence had grown to the point that the people might follow John in a rebellion and sweep away Herod’s regime. Josephus tells us of John’s imprisonment at Machreus (which we know was used as a prison at the time), and his death at the Herod’s command are also described. No Salome and her dance—just a cold calculation by a wily monarch willing to kill the innocent John on the off chance that he posed a danger to Herod’s reign.
Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like the King Herod in the Christmas story, seeking to lure the Magi into betraying the infant Jesus’s location so that Herod could kill him. According to Josephus, the people believed that Herod’s defeat by Aretus IV in 36 AD was God’s punishment for murdering John.
Jesus gets a passage that is shorter when you take out the sentences that were obviously added by later Christian copyists. Jospehus, a Hellenistic follower of Judaism, was not going to write of Jesus: “He was the Son of God!” In the authentic passage, Jesus is described as “a wise man who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly.” His trial under Pilate and crucifixion are noted, and the continued loyalty of his friends after his death. That’s it.
So, if we’re judging by a historian writing 60 years after they both died, John the Baptist is the slightly bigger name, the more important figure. His death is even avenged by God, unlike Jesus’s death. That’s how it looked at the time Josephus wrote—which incidentally is about the time that most scholars believe the last written gospel, the Gospel According to John was written.
But according to the Gospels, John knows better. Today, we hear Luke describe Jesus as “one who is more powerful than I” and even says that he is “not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.” In the Fourth Gospel, John sees the Holy Spirit rest on Jesus at his baptism, and hails him as the Messiah. In all of the Gospels, , John knows that he is not the Messiah, but is here to awaken the world to his coming.
So John gets it. He’s the overture, not the main drama.
And unlike the historian Flavius Josephus, John gets it right. There is still a sect that claims John the Baptist as its chief prophet, the Mandaeans, but Christianity grew to be a truly world-wide religion.
Why? Why Jesus and not John the Baptist? It’s easy now to look at the question through the lens of Christian history and our own faith commitments, but what accounts for the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire like wildfire over a John the Baptist inspired call to repentance and good works? They both taught the same basic ethical lessons—John is described as teaching those who come to him for baptism to take no more than their due, not extort others, to show mercy—they both used baptism to mark the redemption of the initiate, the forgiveness of sins, and called sinners to repent and accept forgiveness.
So why did people choose Jesus?
I think it’s the fact that Jesus met people where they were. John made it hard, didn’t he? You had to go out to the desert to find him, and his welcome wasn’t exactly very warm. I mean, the Pharisees and Saducees make the trip, and he greets them with “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”[1]
What could be more cozy?
Jesus, on the other hand, sees Zacchaeus, a short tax-collector, who has climbed into a tree just to get a look at him as Jesus comes into town, and calls out to him, inviting himself to dinner. The crowd murmurs. After all, Zacchaeus is a notable sinner. But Zacchaeus is so overjoyed that Jesus wants to spend time with him, that he announces that he will give away half of what he owns, and give back 4 times any amount he has unfairly taken from anybody.
Jesus didn’t ask him to do that. He just came to dinner. He accepted Zacchaeus as a peer, a friend, and made Zacchaeus want to live up to Jesus’s estimate of him.
It’s the same way with the unnamed woman, described only as a “woman of the city” and a sinner, who anoints Jesus’s feet with expensive ointment and dries them with her hair. It’s a shocking moment of intimacy even now when we first read it in Luke’s Gospel, but even more so when we consider that it occurs between Jesus and a woman who would have been viewed as polluting him by her touch.
Nobody confronts Jesus about it, Simon, his host, assumes that Jesus would know better if he were a true prophet. Jesus defends the woman, pointing out that her welcome made up for the deficiencies in Simon’s own treatment of him, and praises her for the great love she has shown, in gratitude for the forgiveness she has received—which she understands has been given to her without her even asking!
Jesus even points out the difference in his approach from John’s, in criticizing the crowd that rejected them both: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’”
I recently attended a two day workshop with the Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber. In one of the sessions she described herself as a “Law and Grace preacher.” By that she meant that she saw a very great danger in our tendency to want to prove ourselves to be good people by our complying with the law. She explained that the idea that we’re good enough that all we need is a handbook to follow would mean that we wouldn’t have to bother God with all the stuff about ourselves we’d rather not face. We could just be good. The problem is, Jesus doesn’t buy that. Nobody can live up to the law—it would mean being perfect as our heavenly father is perfect. The law, Nadia said, is a lover who will never love us back.
That’s John the Baptist, in a way. John has been called the last prophet of the Old Testament, and there’s a lot of truth in that, because, although he offers a route to the forgiveness of sins, he carries the burden of the law. He expected Jesus to be like him, with his winnowing fork and with fire.
But Jesus set us free from that burden. Don’t believe me? That Pharisee of Pharisees, as St. Paul called himself, says just that in his letter to the Galatians: “we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.”
In my Roman Catholic boyhood, we used to keep a sort of moral score. Had we sinned badly enough that our venial (not all that serious) sins could add up to a mortal sin (uh-oh!)? Were our spiritual bank accounts overdrawn, or did we have a balance with God?
We don’t have a spiritual checkbook, of course. That’s not God’s way.
Jesus’s way is the way of Grace. Jesus met people where they were, and didn’t judge them—and by meeting them with love opened up new worlds of possibility for them. He changed how they saw themselves, and what they were capable of being. We don’t become perfect, but we meet love with love. And even our failures are transformed by the fact that we are free to love back, instead of trying to impress a strict legal guardian.
We can pass on that gift in our own way. “Judge not, that ye be not judged” isn’t just safer, it gives the people we interact with the chance to respond to us in a less defensive way, to see themselves through our eyes as people worth knowing and caring about as they are, not as we’d like them to be. That’s our part in grace. Pass it on. Love and forgive. And when we can’t, remember that God will do it for us until we can do it ourselves.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
[1] Matt. 3: 7-8.
[2] Matt. 11: 18-19.
[3] Gal. 2:16.
Thursday, December 24, 2015
"God is Here and Christ is Now": A Christmas Eve Sermon
(Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church, New York City, December 24, 2015 at 12:00 pm)
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Well, that happened quickly, didn’t it? 2015, I mean—another calendar year zipping by, a winter that feels more like early Fall, and here we are, once more, on the day that will give way to Christmas Eve.
Are you ready? Am I ready?
I suppose it all depends on what you mean. Am I ready for the glitz, the gifts, my nephew and niece swamping my parents’ living room with wrapping paper?
Not quite.
Oh, I finished my shopping—just. I’m ignoring all the emails from Department Stores, from Amazon and Best Buy and Costco, among various other sellers of things good and less good.
And I’m saying to myself. “It is enough. Let it be enough.”
I don’t come to Christmas the way I did as a child—breathless with excitement for a large pile of toys. One of the down sides of growing up, maybe. But maybe not. Because when the wrapping paper is torn through, and the favorite toys mine at last, the rest of the day could seem anticlimactic. And as adults, we can often buy ourselves the things we want as well as the things we need. So the child’s Christmas in New York approach didn’t work for me anymore.
A few years back, I was rereading a favorite novel of mine,
Robertson Davies' A Mixture of Frailties (1958), in which a young writer enjoys a Christmas in Wales. Davies has him tell a friend that:
I've tried to learn from that, to make the worship central, the good times with family and dear friends central too, and the giving and receiving a pleasant incidental. The joy is in the celebration, the music, and the day, not in the "stuff." The gifts are symbols, symbols of affection and celebration. Even the massive, rock-like Panettone that someone is absolutely going to dump on me.
But what are we celebrating, here, today, in the drab last days of 2015? Isaiah tells us that “unto us a child is born, unto us a child is given.” And in the King James version that sounds pretty impressive. And the shepherds were given the same news, from an angel no less. “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”
But Jesus’s birth took place just about two millennia ago. What are we still celebrating for?
Are we waiting for the Second Coming, when so many think we’ll get the conquering Messiah Jesus refused to be? I don’t get that feeling.
No, I think we’re celebrating something far better than that. I think we’re celebrating the fact that our scriptures and our holy tradition tell us the decisive intervention of God in human affairs was to come down from heaven and share in all our joys and all our sufferings.
To be one of us, and share all the good and all the bad. To roam from town to town, and to help those who would let Him. To choose to die rather than to choose violence, and to love unconditionally throughout his life. Our Christian story isn’t like Greek mythology, where all-powerful gods and goddesses use people up like the toys kids will unwrap tomorrow. It isn’t like Norse mythology, where battles are fought to a standstill, creation is destroyed—and then the whole bloody cycle starts again.
No, our story is one where we first glimpse God in a newborn infant. A little child born in a manger because there was no room at the inn. We first see Jesus as a homeless child, stabled among the animals.
And yet that child is special. He won’t write any books. He won’t be a conqueror. He’ll just serve people, forgive them, heal them, and feed them. And he’ll teach them and us that that’s the very nature of God.
In the wake of the First World War, an Anglican theologian tried to explain to a bruised and battered people what the Incarnation meant, what Christmas was all about. He did it very briefly. “God is love,” Charles Gore wrote, “and love is sympathy and self-sacrifice.” Sympathy doesn’t mean pity—it means to feel with others, to share in their experiences. And self-sacrifice isn’t an exercise in beating oneself up. It’s giving of ourselves to help others.
And so, Gore wrote, “[t]he Incarnation is the supreme act of self sacrificing sympathy, by which one whose nature is divine . . .” emptied himself of divinity in order to grow, feel, think, and suffer like we do.
Or, to put it more bluntly, the story that defines us is one in which love, forgiveness, and compassion are so important that we believe that they are the very best not just of humanity, but of God. And we also believe that that love, that compassion, that forgiveness are as true of God today as they were that first Christmas Eve.
The Christmas story isn’t just a sweet story, it’s our story. It’s the story of love in a violent, often cruel world not so very different from ours. Isis rages, people shoot kids in schools, congregants in a church, or coworkers at a holiday party, and the powers of the world look on, unable to stop the violence, or, worse, fanning the flames.
And that’s just this year.
But God is there, in the victims’ families when they forgave the murderer who opened fire at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. God is there with the teachers who gave their lives to protect their students. And God is there in San Bernardino when Shannon Johnson made himself a human shield for a coworker, telling her “I got you.”
We celebrate the birth of Jesus, we celebrate the Incarnation, because it never ends. It’s not a historical event; it’s ongoing.
We celebrate it because God is here, and Christ is now.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Well, that happened quickly, didn’t it? 2015, I mean—another calendar year zipping by, a winter that feels more like early Fall, and here we are, once more, on the day that will give way to Christmas Eve.
Are you ready? Am I ready?
I suppose it all depends on what you mean. Am I ready for the glitz, the gifts, my nephew and niece swamping my parents’ living room with wrapping paper?
Not quite.
Oh, I finished my shopping—just. I’m ignoring all the emails from Department Stores, from Amazon and Best Buy and Costco, among various other sellers of things good and less good.
And I’m saying to myself. “It is enough. Let it be enough.”
I don’t come to Christmas the way I did as a child—breathless with excitement for a large pile of toys. One of the down sides of growing up, maybe. But maybe not. Because when the wrapping paper is torn through, and the favorite toys mine at last, the rest of the day could seem anticlimactic. And as adults, we can often buy ourselves the things we want as well as the things we need. So the child’s Christmas in New York approach didn’t work for me anymore.
A few years back, I was rereading a favorite novel of mine,
Robertson Davies' A Mixture of Frailties (1958), in which a young writer enjoys a Christmas in Wales. Davies has him tell a friend that:
If I were at home, I would have finished my Christmas shopping a full two weeks ago; I would have wrapped everything up in elaborate paper, and tied it with expensive twine.(P. 176-177 (first ed.))
[Yes, he said "expensive trwine. Just go with it.]
I would approach the great festal day prepared for everything but a good time.... [F]or the first time in my life, I have got Christmas into focus. Tomorrow, I shall worship, I shall feast, and--quite incidentally, I shall give and receive.
I've tried to learn from that, to make the worship central, the good times with family and dear friends central too, and the giving and receiving a pleasant incidental. The joy is in the celebration, the music, and the day, not in the "stuff." The gifts are symbols, symbols of affection and celebration. Even the massive, rock-like Panettone that someone is absolutely going to dump on me.
But what are we celebrating, here, today, in the drab last days of 2015? Isaiah tells us that “unto us a child is born, unto us a child is given.” And in the King James version that sounds pretty impressive. And the shepherds were given the same news, from an angel no less. “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”
But Jesus’s birth took place just about two millennia ago. What are we still celebrating for?
Are we waiting for the Second Coming, when so many think we’ll get the conquering Messiah Jesus refused to be? I don’t get that feeling.
No, I think we’re celebrating something far better than that. I think we’re celebrating the fact that our scriptures and our holy tradition tell us the decisive intervention of God in human affairs was to come down from heaven and share in all our joys and all our sufferings.
To be one of us, and share all the good and all the bad. To roam from town to town, and to help those who would let Him. To choose to die rather than to choose violence, and to love unconditionally throughout his life. Our Christian story isn’t like Greek mythology, where all-powerful gods and goddesses use people up like the toys kids will unwrap tomorrow. It isn’t like Norse mythology, where battles are fought to a standstill, creation is destroyed—and then the whole bloody cycle starts again.
No, our story is one where we first glimpse God in a newborn infant. A little child born in a manger because there was no room at the inn. We first see Jesus as a homeless child, stabled among the animals.
And yet that child is special. He won’t write any books. He won’t be a conqueror. He’ll just serve people, forgive them, heal them, and feed them. And he’ll teach them and us that that’s the very nature of God.
In the wake of the First World War, an Anglican theologian tried to explain to a bruised and battered people what the Incarnation meant, what Christmas was all about. He did it very briefly. “God is love,” Charles Gore wrote, “and love is sympathy and self-sacrifice.” Sympathy doesn’t mean pity—it means to feel with others, to share in their experiences. And self-sacrifice isn’t an exercise in beating oneself up. It’s giving of ourselves to help others.
And so, Gore wrote, “[t]he Incarnation is the supreme act of self sacrificing sympathy, by which one whose nature is divine . . .” emptied himself of divinity in order to grow, feel, think, and suffer like we do.
Or, to put it more bluntly, the story that defines us is one in which love, forgiveness, and compassion are so important that we believe that they are the very best not just of humanity, but of God. And we also believe that that love, that compassion, that forgiveness are as true of God today as they were that first Christmas Eve.
The Christmas story isn’t just a sweet story, it’s our story. It’s the story of love in a violent, often cruel world not so very different from ours. Isis rages, people shoot kids in schools, congregants in a church, or coworkers at a holiday party, and the powers of the world look on, unable to stop the violence, or, worse, fanning the flames.
And that’s just this year.
But God is there, in the victims’ families when they forgave the murderer who opened fire at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. God is there with the teachers who gave their lives to protect their students. And God is there in San Bernardino when Shannon Johnson made himself a human shield for a coworker, telling her “I got you.”
We celebrate the birth of Jesus, we celebrate the Incarnation, because it never ends. It’s not a historical event; it’s ongoing.
We celebrate it because God is here, and Christ is now.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Sunday, December 6, 2015
"The Readiness is All": A Sermon for Advent II, 2015
(Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, NYC
December 6, 2015)
If it be now,
'tis not to come;
if it be not to come, it will be now;
if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.
OK, That’s Hamlet, not Scripture, but I think it has something to tell us about Advent. Advent is one of those seasons of the Church year when the mood inside these walls is especially different from the mood outside. Outside, you can feel the buildup to Christmas intensifying. Get your shopping done! There are bargains to be had—better hurry! Buy for the kids, the parents, the spouse. And, hey—buy something for yourself, too. After all, who knows what you want better than you do?
Inside here though—the readings take us to a very different place. The unknown prophet named by tradition as Malachi starts off on a joyful note--the Lord whom we seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom we delight—he is coming. And then the prophet asks us, darkly, “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?”
He tells us that the Lord will refine us like silver—which involves a lot of fire—and the experience will be like cleansing garments with fuller’s soap. Now, fuller's soap is not Ivory Snow, or some nice gentle cleanser that softens your hands while you do the dishes. It’s made of alkali, urine and chalk. It’s like taking a bath in bleach, only it smells worse. A lot worse.
So, like many Episcopalians before us, we flee from the Old Testament to the New. Where Luke introduces us to the uncomfortable figure of John the Baptist, fiercely preaching a severe gospel of repentance.
Is this Advent or Lent we’re going through, anyway?
And is our beloved holiday season really a warning to be afraid, to be very afraid, of the judgment of the Lord?
No. I don’t believe that it is.
“Be not afraid” Jesus says over and over, in all of the Gospels, so I’m pretty sure we don’t have to dread his presence in our lives. Whatever Advent means, and these readings mean, it isn’t that. We don't follow the Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards, who famously warned his own parishioners, “God holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.” That’s very dramatic, and I’m sure it increased the offering that week, but it’s bad theology. Even in a week when The New York Times that there have more mass shootings than days this year—it’s still bad theology.
The Fourth Gospel tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son,” and did so that we could become children of God. All of us.
The proper response to that good news is joy, but joy with a tinge of awe. We don’t do awe well in our generation. We toss around the word “awesome” as a synonym for “excellent” or “good.” But that’s not awe.
Look around you, at this space we have the honor of worshipping in—the explosions of color and light in the Rose Window, the blending of wood and stone, brick and marble. We’re in a place of celebration, but it’s celebration that has a solemn quality to it. It’s joyful, but it’s a joy that carries deep meaning, and mystery. We’ll never completely understand it, but it’s real and can move our hearts, so that we come back week after week.
Awe can be frightening. And I’m not going to conjure up all the standard nature metaphors—beautiful but terrifying lightning storms, or incredible mountain vistas. Because good though they are, we’re talking about God, and I can’t have a relationship with Niagara Falls, or a mountain. It can’t know us, can’t love us the way we are taught, and the way I believe, that God loves us.
No, let’s stick closer to home for this. Think back to the first moment you realized were in love. Not infatuation. Not desire. The real thing. Now, I can’t speak for anybody but me, but mixed in with that unbelievable joy, that thrill that only the presence of that one special person can bring, is a kind of fear. The fear of being vulnerable. Will she love me back? What happens when he gets to know how insecure I am? Will I get hurt?
That’s awe.
And becoming aware, really taking on board, the love of God carries with it some awe. It’s hard to accept that we are loved by God. It’s especially hard to find room in our busy lives in an increasingly scary world that seems out of joint. With all that, how can we make space for a relationship with a God we can’t see, or touch, or whose voice we can’t hear.
It’s hard to remember the children we once were, and find that kind of spontaneity in ourselves again.
And that’s what Advent is for.
It’s a time for finding that moment when we feel at one with the world, where we can open ourselves to feelings we so often push to the side.
And how on earth do we do that?
Well, in AA, we have a saying—act as if. Be a part of what’s happening here these next few weeks before Christmas. Stay for coffee afterward, maybe take a tour. Maybe take an active part. There are all kinds of ways, you know—help decorate the church for Christmas, wrap toys to be given to children to fulfill Christmas wishes.
Here’s a secret—Community Ministry gives you the opportunity to meet incredible people, both our volunteers but especially our guests, who so often taught me what grace under pressure really is like. If that’s not for you, you can take a class—we have everything from Bible study to yoga classes throughout the week. Or just be here and soak it in, and clear some space for yourself to breathe. And listen. Don’t worry if you don’t hear anything. You will when the time is right for you.
Advent for me is a chance to make that space in life so that we can hear the inmost promptings of the heart, can open ourselves to discovering where our “deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Now, I stole those words. They’re from Frederick Buchner, and they’re the best translation I’ve come upon for what theologians mean when they talk about God calling each of us, clergy and lay, to a special ministry. It’s finding that place, he , “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Some find that place in ordained ministry, as priests, or, as I have, as a permanent deacon.
But our lay ministers and volunteers, our altar guild, the incredibly talented musicians who create beauty here every week, are responding to that call. And so are many people whose responses we don’t see, because they pursue that calling outside the church walls, and we’re here as a community and sustenance for them.
Advent is a bit like Lent, then.
It’s a chance to stop a bit, recognize that every day the world offers us all chances to find that place, and put our deep gladness to work. It’s a chance to step back from the rush, and get ready to hear. It’s a chance to oppose the cruelties and violence that are so common in our world, and by opposing end them. Not with more violence, but by acts of kindness and a refusal to accept that cruelty and violence establish the norm. They do not. So Advent is not a deadline; it’s a process. It’s about readiness.
If it be now,
'tis not to come;
if it be not to come, it will be now;
if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
December 6, 2015)
If it be now,
'tis not to come;
if it be not to come, it will be now;
if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.
OK, That’s Hamlet, not Scripture, but I think it has something to tell us about Advent. Advent is one of those seasons of the Church year when the mood inside these walls is especially different from the mood outside. Outside, you can feel the buildup to Christmas intensifying. Get your shopping done! There are bargains to be had—better hurry! Buy for the kids, the parents, the spouse. And, hey—buy something for yourself, too. After all, who knows what you want better than you do?
Inside here though—the readings take us to a very different place. The unknown prophet named by tradition as Malachi starts off on a joyful note--the Lord whom we seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom we delight—he is coming. And then the prophet asks us, darkly, “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?”
He tells us that the Lord will refine us like silver—which involves a lot of fire—and the experience will be like cleansing garments with fuller’s soap. Now, fuller's soap is not Ivory Snow, or some nice gentle cleanser that softens your hands while you do the dishes. It’s made of alkali, urine and chalk. It’s like taking a bath in bleach, only it smells worse. A lot worse.
So, like many Episcopalians before us, we flee from the Old Testament to the New. Where Luke introduces us to the uncomfortable figure of John the Baptist, fiercely preaching a severe gospel of repentance.
Is this Advent or Lent we’re going through, anyway?
And is our beloved holiday season really a warning to be afraid, to be very afraid, of the judgment of the Lord?
No. I don’t believe that it is.
“Be not afraid” Jesus says over and over, in all of the Gospels, so I’m pretty sure we don’t have to dread his presence in our lives. Whatever Advent means, and these readings mean, it isn’t that. We don't follow the Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards, who famously warned his own parishioners, “God holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.” That’s very dramatic, and I’m sure it increased the offering that week, but it’s bad theology. Even in a week when The New York Times that there have more mass shootings than days this year—it’s still bad theology.
The Fourth Gospel tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son,” and did so that we could become children of God. All of us.
The proper response to that good news is joy, but joy with a tinge of awe. We don’t do awe well in our generation. We toss around the word “awesome” as a synonym for “excellent” or “good.” But that’s not awe.
Look around you, at this space we have the honor of worshipping in—the explosions of color and light in the Rose Window, the blending of wood and stone, brick and marble. We’re in a place of celebration, but it’s celebration that has a solemn quality to it. It’s joyful, but it’s a joy that carries deep meaning, and mystery. We’ll never completely understand it, but it’s real and can move our hearts, so that we come back week after week.
Awe can be frightening. And I’m not going to conjure up all the standard nature metaphors—beautiful but terrifying lightning storms, or incredible mountain vistas. Because good though they are, we’re talking about God, and I can’t have a relationship with Niagara Falls, or a mountain. It can’t know us, can’t love us the way we are taught, and the way I believe, that God loves us.
No, let’s stick closer to home for this. Think back to the first moment you realized were in love. Not infatuation. Not desire. The real thing. Now, I can’t speak for anybody but me, but mixed in with that unbelievable joy, that thrill that only the presence of that one special person can bring, is a kind of fear. The fear of being vulnerable. Will she love me back? What happens when he gets to know how insecure I am? Will I get hurt?
That’s awe.
And becoming aware, really taking on board, the love of God carries with it some awe. It’s hard to accept that we are loved by God. It’s especially hard to find room in our busy lives in an increasingly scary world that seems out of joint. With all that, how can we make space for a relationship with a God we can’t see, or touch, or whose voice we can’t hear.
It’s hard to remember the children we once were, and find that kind of spontaneity in ourselves again.
And that’s what Advent is for.
It’s a time for finding that moment when we feel at one with the world, where we can open ourselves to feelings we so often push to the side.
And how on earth do we do that?
Well, in AA, we have a saying—act as if. Be a part of what’s happening here these next few weeks before Christmas. Stay for coffee afterward, maybe take a tour. Maybe take an active part. There are all kinds of ways, you know—help decorate the church for Christmas, wrap toys to be given to children to fulfill Christmas wishes.
Here’s a secret—Community Ministry gives you the opportunity to meet incredible people, both our volunteers but especially our guests, who so often taught me what grace under pressure really is like. If that’s not for you, you can take a class—we have everything from Bible study to yoga classes throughout the week. Or just be here and soak it in, and clear some space for yourself to breathe. And listen. Don’t worry if you don’t hear anything. You will when the time is right for you.
Advent for me is a chance to make that space in life so that we can hear the inmost promptings of the heart, can open ourselves to discovering where our “deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Now, I stole those words. They’re from Frederick Buchner, and they’re the best translation I’ve come upon for what theologians mean when they talk about God calling each of us, clergy and lay, to a special ministry. It’s finding that place, he , “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Some find that place in ordained ministry, as priests, or, as I have, as a permanent deacon.
But our lay ministers and volunteers, our altar guild, the incredibly talented musicians who create beauty here every week, are responding to that call. And so are many people whose responses we don’t see, because they pursue that calling outside the church walls, and we’re here as a community and sustenance for them.
Advent is a bit like Lent, then.
It’s a chance to stop a bit, recognize that every day the world offers us all chances to find that place, and put our deep gladness to work. It’s a chance to step back from the rush, and get ready to hear. It’s a chance to oppose the cruelties and violence that are so common in our world, and by opposing end them. Not with more violence, but by acts of kindness and a refusal to accept that cruelty and violence establish the norm. They do not. So Advent is not a deadline; it’s a process. It’s about readiness.
If it be now,
'tis not to come;
if it be not to come, it will be now;
if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Anglocat in the Pulpit Redux: Advent Sermonizing
So, as the new deacon at St Bartholomew's Church, I'm getting two chances to preach in Advent. First, on the Second Sunday of Advent, I'll be preaching at the 9:00 AM (Corrected, thanks to Claude Scales in comments) and the 5:00 pm services.
The readings for that day are a trifle dark, combining anticipation with a little dread: "the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight--indeed, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?"
Who indeed?
I have to admit, the minute I was invited to preach and looked up the readings, my favorite passage from Shakespeare popped into my mind:
Second, on Christmas Eve, I'll be participating in all the services (!), but preaching at the 12:00 p.m., with my good friend Rev. Lynn Sanders presiding. It's a tremendous honor to preach at the first of St. Barts' Christmas Eve services (followed by the pageant at 4, the Choral Eucharist (the Christ-mass) at 7 and then again, but with incense and extra brio, at 11 pm).
Keep me in your prayers and/or c'mon by!
The readings for that day are a trifle dark, combining anticipation with a little dread: "the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight--indeed, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?"
Who indeed?
I have to admit, the minute I was invited to preach and looked up the readings, my favorite passage from Shakespeare popped into my mind:
If it be now,So that will be the leitmotif of my first sermon.
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all.
Second, on Christmas Eve, I'll be participating in all the services (!), but preaching at the 12:00 p.m., with my good friend Rev. Lynn Sanders presiding. It's a tremendous honor to preach at the first of St. Barts' Christmas Eve services (followed by the pageant at 4, the Choral Eucharist (the Christ-mass) at 7 and then again, but with incense and extra brio, at 11 pm).
Keep me in your prayers and/or c'mon by!
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Time Mirror
When I was in the discernment process, before I had been recommended by my parish to the Diocese, I attended--thanks to the urging of my mentor and good friend, the Deacon (I guess I have to say the senior deacon now) at St. Bartholomew's Church--a retreat. A friend of mine, in the discernment process for the priesthood, described the Fraction as the "moment when the one who is whole becomes broken, so that we who are broken can become whole." I mulled the throughout for a long time afterward. It was true, beautiful, moving and spiritually alive and resonant for me. It was also a thought that would never have passed through my own mind, though in hearing it, I saw its profundity. I told her then that I believed with all my heart that her call to the priesthood was genuine. (She has since been ordained a priest.)
And it made me wonder if my call was not to the priesthood, but to something else.
Some months later, I was delivering a committee report about improving our church communications. It was in the wake of the financial crash, and I advocated for getting some computers donated, training some of our neighbors who had been unemployed as a result of the crash, and having them digitize our archives for use online. We could, I argued, help the unemployed learn new skills, give them a resume line to keep them viable in the job market, and at the same time improve our website.
When I finished, a short break was called. My friend who had spoken so eloquently of the Fraction sought me out, looked me squarely in the eyes, and said to me: "You're a deacon." And in that moment, I knew she was right, whether I was ever ordained or not.
***
Another friend of mine, professionally accomplished, with a busy life, had a few months back been in touch with me about wanting to undergo Clinical Pastoral Education. I told her what I knew about it, put her in touch with some people I knew, and offered to do more if she needed. She reached out to me again the other day, and we spoke on the phone. She told me that she was in a program, described what she'd been doing,and told me she felt that she might be being called to the diaconate. we discussed the discernment process, the formation and training, field placement--everything. She then started musing on how she'd been doing volunteer work since she was a girl, but always practical, always helping people not within the four corners of the church, but outside in the world, and now felt the need to integrate that with her spiritual practice--that she felt called to more, and that's why CPE was so important, even though it didn't encompass all that she wanted to do. Again and again, she used the word serve to describe her call.
I can't adequately describe the frisson I felt at that moment--the physical sensation running from the crown of my head to the base of my spine--the sensation that always accompanies for me those "peak moments," as my old teacher, Fr. R.F. Smith at Fordham, used to call them--those moments when the world aligns, and I recognize what's been staring me in the face all along. I felt as if I were in an echo in time, but with the roles changed.
"You're a deacon," I heard myself say.
Of course, the Church will ultimately decide that, not me, but that she has the heart of a deacon, that she is called to servant ministry, whether ordained or lay, I have no doubt.
And it made me wonder if my call was not to the priesthood, but to something else.
Some months later, I was delivering a committee report about improving our church communications. It was in the wake of the financial crash, and I advocated for getting some computers donated, training some of our neighbors who had been unemployed as a result of the crash, and having them digitize our archives for use online. We could, I argued, help the unemployed learn new skills, give them a resume line to keep them viable in the job market, and at the same time improve our website.
When I finished, a short break was called. My friend who had spoken so eloquently of the Fraction sought me out, looked me squarely in the eyes, and said to me: "You're a deacon." And in that moment, I knew she was right, whether I was ever ordained or not.
***
Another friend of mine, professionally accomplished, with a busy life, had a few months back been in touch with me about wanting to undergo Clinical Pastoral Education. I told her what I knew about it, put her in touch with some people I knew, and offered to do more if she needed. She reached out to me again the other day, and we spoke on the phone. She told me that she was in a program, described what she'd been doing,and told me she felt that she might be being called to the diaconate. we discussed the discernment process, the formation and training, field placement--everything. She then started musing on how she'd been doing volunteer work since she was a girl, but always practical, always helping people not within the four corners of the church, but outside in the world, and now felt the need to integrate that with her spiritual practice--that she felt called to more, and that's why CPE was so important, even though it didn't encompass all that she wanted to do. Again and again, she used the word serve to describe her call.
I can't adequately describe the frisson I felt at that moment--the physical sensation running from the crown of my head to the base of my spine--the sensation that always accompanies for me those "peak moments," as my old teacher, Fr. R.F. Smith at Fordham, used to call them--those moments when the world aligns, and I recognize what's been staring me in the face all along. I felt as if I were in an echo in time, but with the roles changed.
"You're a deacon," I heard myself say.
Of course, the Church will ultimately decide that, not me, but that she has the heart of a deacon, that she is called to servant ministry, whether ordained or lay, I have no doubt.
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
The Shape of Things
I spoke not long ago with an old friend, and we talked a little bit about ministry to the sick. I haven't done all that much yet--my field parish didn't need any hospital or home visits in my time there, and so my main experience was Clinical Pastoral Training (the less-intensive version of Clinical Pastoral Education we deacons receive), which I did at at New York Presbyterian. But our conversation reminded me of ow afraid I'd been of CPT before I did it.
Not for myself, really--I was deathly afraid that I'd let down the patients that I was there to help. I doubted my own ability to bring any comfort, because my primary ways of dealing with the world--knowledge and deploying it--were useless. I knew that much.
What I didn't realize is that a willingness to plunge in, listen, and meet people where they are was really all I had to bring into the room. The rest was God and the patient. I was really there as catalyst to that conversation--a witness in some cases, in other, a proxy--someone to whom the patient could say the things they needed to say to God, but needed someone who would visibly hear it for it to have meaning. Sometimes I was there just to be a symbol that God and the Church had not abandoned the ailing person. And on one occasion, my role was to help the family by providing a liturgical framework n which to say their goodbyes.
In none of those roles did I do anything clever or special. To paraphrase David Niven, I showed up, I stood with the sick person, and I paid attention. I was mindful, I'll give myself that. And that's not nothing.
Mindfulness isn't easy--it's a personal flaw of mine that I can get so wrapped in my own thoughts that I am not aware of what's right in front of me. So the fact that I was able to get out of the way, and be there for the person I was there to serve and the God who called me to that service is a big deal for me. But this isn't ultimately about me.
***
No, it's about the shape of things--how there can be a beauty in the lifecycle, even with the pain that entails. I knew someone once who had fractured several relationships that were important to her. When she was diagnosed with a terminal illness, the jolt of impending mortality galvanized her into action; she used her last months to repair those relationships insofar as she could. I've never seen more meaning plucked from a tragic situation.
Sometimes I get asked--especially if I'm wearing the clerical collar--how my faith survives a world in which terrible things happen to good people on a daily basis--not in a hostile way, but in a sense of genuine curiosity. I don't have perfect answer, other than for me that's the point of the Incarnation--God isn't estranged from our sufferings, watching them afar like the gods in Lear; no, God is here in the world suffering with and for us, and helping us to draw meaning from suffering.
But why do we suffer, why do we die? Maybe we need to be finite, to have endings, to impel us to the sort of heroic reconciliation the woman I mentioned performed in her last months. Maybe we need to age and die to let go of this good Creation for whatever lies ahead. Because I don't believe that death is the end, you see. The writings of the mystics, and the weaker "peak experiences" described by Abraham Maslow, happen more often than we think. Inge wrote that the mystical facility is one which all posses, but few develop. Inge quotes his beloved Plotinus: "Nothing that truly is can ever perish." Robertson Davies agreed with him in his last novel, The Cunning Man. I don't believe it because they say so, but their testimony, and that of many others, validates my own experience and intuitions.
But this is becoming intellectual again, and that's not where I want to go. I'm not able to give you the answer why life has a shape that includes suffering, the sadness and rewards of aging and includes death. It does; that's all. But the experience of witnessing people drawing meaning and beauty from those facts has enriched me sufficiently that I don't experience these facts as undermining my faith, though they challenge me in living my own life.
Not for myself, really--I was deathly afraid that I'd let down the patients that I was there to help. I doubted my own ability to bring any comfort, because my primary ways of dealing with the world--knowledge and deploying it--were useless. I knew that much.
What I didn't realize is that a willingness to plunge in, listen, and meet people where they are was really all I had to bring into the room. The rest was God and the patient. I was really there as catalyst to that conversation--a witness in some cases, in other, a proxy--someone to whom the patient could say the things they needed to say to God, but needed someone who would visibly hear it for it to have meaning. Sometimes I was there just to be a symbol that God and the Church had not abandoned the ailing person. And on one occasion, my role was to help the family by providing a liturgical framework n which to say their goodbyes.
In none of those roles did I do anything clever or special. To paraphrase David Niven, I showed up, I stood with the sick person, and I paid attention. I was mindful, I'll give myself that. And that's not nothing.
Mindfulness isn't easy--it's a personal flaw of mine that I can get so wrapped in my own thoughts that I am not aware of what's right in front of me. So the fact that I was able to get out of the way, and be there for the person I was there to serve and the God who called me to that service is a big deal for me. But this isn't ultimately about me.
***
No, it's about the shape of things--how there can be a beauty in the lifecycle, even with the pain that entails. I knew someone once who had fractured several relationships that were important to her. When she was diagnosed with a terminal illness, the jolt of impending mortality galvanized her into action; she used her last months to repair those relationships insofar as she could. I've never seen more meaning plucked from a tragic situation.
Sometimes I get asked--especially if I'm wearing the clerical collar--how my faith survives a world in which terrible things happen to good people on a daily basis--not in a hostile way, but in a sense of genuine curiosity. I don't have perfect answer, other than for me that's the point of the Incarnation--God isn't estranged from our sufferings, watching them afar like the gods in Lear; no, God is here in the world suffering with and for us, and helping us to draw meaning from suffering.
But why do we suffer, why do we die? Maybe we need to be finite, to have endings, to impel us to the sort of heroic reconciliation the woman I mentioned performed in her last months. Maybe we need to age and die to let go of this good Creation for whatever lies ahead. Because I don't believe that death is the end, you see. The writings of the mystics, and the weaker "peak experiences" described by Abraham Maslow, happen more often than we think. Inge wrote that the mystical facility is one which all posses, but few develop. Inge quotes his beloved Plotinus: "Nothing that truly is can ever perish." Robertson Davies agreed with him in his last novel, The Cunning Man. I don't believe it because they say so, but their testimony, and that of many others, validates my own experience and intuitions.
But this is becoming intellectual again, and that's not where I want to go. I'm not able to give you the answer why life has a shape that includes suffering, the sadness and rewards of aging and includes death. It does; that's all. But the experience of witnessing people drawing meaning and beauty from those facts has enriched me sufficiently that I don't experience these facts as undermining my faith, though they challenge me in living my own life.
Friday, September 18, 2015
"If you're going to try my case for me, I wish you wouldn't lose it."
So saith Paul Newman in The Verdict, and I have to say I agree.
You know, I am so very, very tired of conservatives telling me what I,as a liberal Christian, think; the latest example is Rod Dreher quoting Rev. John Azumah, a a Presbyterian pastor from Ghana, who teaches at a PC(USA) seminary in the United States, describing his students' reaction to an imam's guest-lecturing:
They were agitated by what the imam said about homosexuality, but seemed wholly at ease with his negation of fundamental Christian beliefs. If this were a seminary in Ghana, my home country, the reverse would have been the case.Oh, please. the Bible has many precepts that the neither we liberals nor the conservatives here or in the Global South don't follow. Usury has wreaked incalculable damage on the poor and has helped core out the middle class (subprime mortgage crisis, anyone), but I don't hear the SoCons railing against usury, despite its being the subject of 3 times the number of biblical prohibitions as is homosexuality. (For my overview on both usury and same-sex marriage see here). So please spare me the notion that the Bible is living and vital for conservatives but isn't for liberals. I'm just not buying.
****
I have come to the conclusion that the doctrinal differences between American liberals and African traditionalists originate in deeper conflicts. We may argue about what the Bible says about sexuality, but there is a broader, unstated disagreement over the Bible itself. For mainstream Western society, the Bible is an ancient text that might arouse intellectual curiosity or become the subject of historical analysis, but it is hardly a sacred book. It has no more authority in American culture than the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King’s speeches, and other notable historic statements. Dropping the language of “obedience to Scripture” and “conformity to the historic confessional standards” from the PC(USA) Ordination Standards underscores this point.
The Bible has a very different status in African societies. Where Christianity has become dominant in the last century, the Bible remains a sacred text, relevant and living. The Bible is more than a compilation of historical documents.
But the effect of the Bible overall in my life has been immense. And I take this seriously. I was ordained a vocational deacon in May, after more than 7 years of discernment and training. That means that I have made a commitment. I hope that, with God's help, my ministry will be of service to those who hunger and thirst, who are prisoners and need encouragement, to the sick, the widows and orphans, and that I may, again with God's help and through His grace, bring the light of Christ into dark places. Trust me, I need to more than just believe in God to even try to do that; I need to rely n God. My hospital training taught me that. It ain't about me.
So I don't like to hear my faith being written off as Dreher and Azumah as if they knew me. I believe in the Creed, quite simply, including the Resurrection and the Trinity. Period. This makes me somewhat traditionalist in my theology (I'm in accord with the so-called Second Anglo-Catholic movement, as ably described by Charles Gore, but those whom I know in the Church who take more modern approaches--well, we're all reaching to describe the same experience, the experience W.R. Inge described in 1899 as the "raw material of all religion"--the experience of transcendence and of immanence. Of course we describe it differently; it's experience we're discussing, not mathematical theorems, and experience is filtered through our unique personal sensitivities and perceptions.
Why weren't the students pressing the Imam on his lack of belief in Christian doctrines such as the resurrection and the Trinity? Possibly, oh, let's have a wild stab at this--because they know he's not a Christian, but rather a Muslim, and therefore that part of his talk was neither new nor shocking? And maybe they were being polite?
I don't know; he was there and I wasn't. But the plural of anecdotes isn't data, as they say, and more to the point, if you're going to frame my argument for me, at least try to look at it as I experience and live it. If you're going to try my case for me, don't throw it.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Not For My Peace. . .
If you look at the heavy-set cove who is carrying the first cross (at :26-29), there I am. I've grayed more than I realized in the last 5 years, but I was heavier then than I knew, so we'll call it a wash. Not all that consoling, really.
But--here's the thing: There I am, a lay minister, in 2010. Our second cross, a dear friend with a wicked sense of humor, is now a verger. At least one other lay minister in that clip has been ordained a priest. Bill Tully, Bruce Forbes, Buddy Stallings, have retired from St. Barts, though are dear to me still. And that looks suspiciously like another dear friend, who moved to my other NYC parish, Trinity Wall Street, where I led Evening Prayer on Mondays for 5 years.
And now I am ordained, and my diaconal ministry will begin at the place that formed me, St. Barts.
And so, I think of "rare" Ben Jonson, who wrote:
Else I my state should much mistakeWhat better place to begin this new journey than my long-time home?
To harbour a divided thought
From all my kind—that, for my sake,
There should a miracle be wrought.
No, I do know that I was born
To age, misfortune, sickness, grief:
But I will bear these with that scorn
As shall not need thy false relief.
Nor for my peace will I go far,
As wanderers do, that still do roam;
But make my strengths, such as they are,
Here in my bosom, and at home.
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Be Not Another. . .
Well, here's a new one:
I was the envy of my 30-something friends in Palo Alto, Calif. I had my own law office right on California Avenue. People charged with crimes handed me cash, in advance, over a big oak desk. Occasionally, I’d make a couple of grand in an afternoon.And, ultimately, found his bliss in the right profession:
But soon, my body started giving out one part at a time. First a shoulder, then my lower back, knee cartilage, neck vertebrae. Two groin hernia surgeries later, at 33 years old, I could not lift a bag of groceries, or sit without an orthopedic pillow. After 10 years as a law student and lawyer, working in a profession I didn’t like was taking its toll.
I sold my practice and fled to San Miguel de Allende in the Mexican state of Guanajuato.
Studying want ads one evening, the one that got my blood moving promised to train me as a party clown, and send me out at $25 per show. Years earlier, I’d dreamed of becoming so weightless that I bounced off the ceiling. I could see myself in a billowy clown suit. After a free training session, I purchased the starter kit for $59 and waited for them to call.Right, you're all expecting me to have a little fun with this guy, right? A sarcastic jibe, perhaps, a little sly humor?
Within a week, the company dispatched me to a party for a 7-year-old at a Ground Round restaurant in Yonkers. I applied colorful makeup, donned oversize shoes, orange wig, bag of tricks. It took a minute to decide on “Bobo” as my name. I silly-walked up to a table of children in the party room. By the end of the performance, the birthday boy said to me, “Bobo, I love you.” In the car later, I rested my head on the steering wheel. An unexpected feeling surfaced: happiness.
Nope.
Well done, Robert Markowitz. Really, I mean it. There are far too many miserable lawyers out there. Many are trapped in jobs that aren't right for them, but could be happier in a better fitting position (I myself was miserable as a big firm attorney but have loved my public interest work--and even then, other things have called to me to supplement that career--the diaconate, writing, to name the two most important), but a lot shouldn't be lawyers at all.
Seriously, I mean that. If you don't love legal practice, it'll kill ya. It requires a lot of steady hard slog, wading through materials that are very dry, and gratification is delayed for years. If you aren't a natural born lawyer, if the stuff hasn't got a hold of your heart for whatever reason (la Caterina is one, too, but somewhat differently than me)--get out and save yourself, like Robert Markowitz did. Because life's too short.
In his excellent novel The Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies quotes Paracelsus: "Be not another if thou canst be thyself."
Good advice, very good advice.
So bravo to Robert Markowitz, and best wishes for another 20 years of success to Bobo the Clown.
As long as nobody expects me to don the red nose, that is.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
"Hate Won't Win"
The above video shows the families of the victims of Dylann Roof, one after the other, forgiving the murderer of their loved ones.
By chance, I met today a friend of one of the victims, appropriately enough at the end of a service at St Bartholomew's Church. We spoke a little; I listened, really. What could I say, but to offer to pray for her and her late friend, Ethel Lance? Seemingly Quixotic, as God already has her soul in His keeping, but that's on the plane of logic. That's not where prayer works. Every little flame of prayer, flickering candles though they be, staves off the darkness. We pray not because Ethel Lance needs my intercession, but because by her friend's touching my heart, she herself has become more real to me than a story in a newspaper. And so, even in this temporal plane, her life echoes a little more, in a different direction.
And my prayers, added to all the prayers of other strangers become brothers by having been touched by Ethel Lance's life, well--as one note in that symphony, will effect all of us who pray, and those our lives touch.
What becomes of all that prayerful energy and intent, I'll leave to God.
But one more thing: Today, I was present when my friend the Rev. Matthew Moretz preached eloquently on two intertwining themes: the harm that results when we fear to name evil, and the importance of confronting it, so as to be prepared to counter it, with love and forgiveness. The whole sermon is worth your time, but here's a piece that especially resonated with me:
On the radio, I heard the President call the forgiveness of the victim’s families “unimaginable.” This may be an idiom, but it just isn’t that helpful. What they did is part of a web of life that is not only imaginable, but has been lived out successfully for untold centuries, since at least the patriarch Joseph. You can see in the stone of this church the moment when he forgave his brothers who had nearly killed him. Placing the “Unimaginable” label on something so real and historical ends up blinding us to the Way of True Life that is accessible to anyone.Listening to Matthew, I remembered my classmate Theresa Gorski, murdered two and a half years ago. And the difficulty of the restorative justice ministry I am beginning to research and envision. It's a big one, and daunting. But those nine families in Charleston just showed me how it's done, and Ethel Lance, Theresa Gorski, and untold myriads of others deserve to be the impetus for something worthwhile.
And like calling the murders “unspeakable,” it places these very real things, things that could help us, in a world of shadows. We have to learn how to speak about evil, yes, but it doesn’t end there in despair. Our honesty is a doorway, not a corner. Like the saints before us, we are charged with not only imagining but living out the very real and well worn path of mercy and forgiveness that will lead us out of the dark.
Can we get to the point where our surprise is not so pronounced? The people of Emanuel weren’t caught off guard. They were deeply wounded, yes. But they were ready. After generations of enduring the legacy of slavery and racism, and somehow continuing to pray and live and love, they were ready. They had been scouring the Scriptures and their hearts for the life of God under an ever-present post-slavery terror and the often deadly indignities that come with that legacy. Our fellow Christians know that these violent storms of hate from their neighbor must be endured with mercy and forgiveness, not amplified by more revenge and violence. Rather than using some curse to find a way forward, even further into the dark, they resolutely chose to bless their way into the future. And so they forgave the perpetrator.
Heaven forbid something of this magnitude would ever happen to us. But if so, I hope that we might be prepared. Prepared to continue the new life that some have called “unimaginable.” Prepared to soak our anguish in mercy; to mend our broken hearts with grace; and be encouraged, like the panicked disciples in that wave-tossed boat with Jesus, to trust God to guide us through these storms of violence and hate, to the calm on the other side of it. So that we are not ultimately panicked or scattered or terrorized by what hits us.
As Alana Simmons said to the killer of her grandfather, "Hate won't win."
Amen.
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