“The World Turned Upside Down”: A Sermon on Luke 6:17-26

[Delivered at
St. Bartholomew’s Church
February 17, 2019]



(at 4:10)

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Like many great stories, the one about the British forces under Lord Cornwallis playing the song “The World Turned Upside Down” at the surrender ceremony that ended the siege at Yorktown is probably not true.

(Don’t tell Lin-Manuel Miranda, ok?)

But as George MacDonald Fraser once wrote, if it isn’t true, well, it ought to be.

Lord Cornwallis’s song choices aside, “The World Turned Upside Down” is a British song that dates back at least to the 17th Century, and, I think, it can shed a light into today’s Gospel.

Yes, you heard me. Shed light into today’s Gospel. Yes, that's what I said. I said it.

And why would the Beatitudes, among the most beloved passages in Scripture, need light shone into them?

Who can’t get on board with the blessings? What could be more comforting than knowing that the poor, the hungry, those whose devotion to Christ causes them to be marginalized and excluded will know joy, even if they suffer now?

Sure, that's easy.

But then we have the next verses, and these are all too often pushed to the side, or minimized:

But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.

“Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.

“Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.

“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

For those of us who are not the oppressed, these latter verses can be a little--daunting.

Are we meant to seek out suffering, so that we can earn the rewards of the poor, the persecuted, the reviled?

Are we supposed to crush every natural instinct for happiness, instead dwelling in somber misery, hoping that the loss of joy in this life will be more than made up for in the next?

Are we supposed to be Puritan vegetable folk, like Lord and Lady Whiteadder in the old British comedy Blackadder, treating themselves to the sumptuous meal of a turnip apiece?

It sounds almost comic in our contemporary hedonistic society, but a terrifying number of people do exactly that.

In her latest book, Shameless, Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber writes about the torment inflicted on gay, lesbian, trans, and other people whose sexuality does not fit the calcified limits of fundamentalist or even traditionalist interpretations of Scripture.

Many are taught to hate themselves from their childhood on up, and become their own torturers.

This self-torture isn’t limited to sexuality of course. Bolz-Weber points out how women in those traditions are not allowed to own or claim their own talents, identities and joy in life, and how all too many men in clerical collars are eager to clamp women in spiritual chains.

As a man in a clerical collar, I have to acknowledge the truth of this, and can only recoil in horror at the abuses she describes.

And it isn’t limited to fundamentalists, either—as someone raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, I experienced teaching aimed at pushing me toward a patriarchal role, one that is not who I am, or want to be—the kind of man I have no desire to be. Nothing like as extreme as what Bolz-Weber describes, but nonetheless a very real efforts at conditioning.

She writes that: “We should not be more loyal to an idea, a doctrine, or an interpretation of a Bible verse than we are to people. If the teachings of the church are harming the bodies and spirits of people, we should rethink those teachings.” [1]

Bolz-Weber reminds us that “[f]ive hundred years ago, Martin Luther took a look at the harm in his own parishioners’ spiritual lives, specifically their torment from trying to fulfill the sacramental obligations that the church determined would please an angry God.”[2]

She reminds us that Luther dared to think that the story of God coming to humanity in Jesus of Nazareth, and speaking to us the words of life—could free his parishioners from the harm their own church had done them, and tells us that Luther was “less loyal to the teachings of the church than he was to people.”[3]

So should we be.

There’s a reason I have often called Bolz-Weber my favorite living theologian, and here’s why: She says the truths I wish I had recognized for myself.

My favorite, well, how to put this discreetly--not-living theologian is Charles Gore, who lived from 1853 to 1932. Toward the end of his long ministry, he wrote a long defense of Christianity as rational, relevant, and still important in the post World War I era under the title The Reconstruction of Belief.

Here’s Gore, in agreement with Pastor Nadia, describing “the fluidity of all the religions of history”—including Christianity—“and the transitoriness of their specific forms”: “The letter killeth, we hear it said,” Gore wrote, “but the Spirit giveth life. The Spirit must be free to ‘lead us into all the truth,’ and we must expect to see all of the standards and formulas of the past, however venerable, superseded in the light of increasing knowledge, and the sacred books of the past read in a light their authors would not have recognized.”[4]

In other words, the Beatitudes are not Jesus telling us to seek out misery, to frown when others would smile, to turn away from the joys of life. His own life makes that perfectly clear—in the very next chapter of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus quotes his critics, who after rejecting the ascetic John the Baptist as “having a devil,” then denounce Jesus himself. “The Son of Man came eating and drinking,” Jesus says, and “ye say, behold a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!” [Lk 7:34]

So what then are these Beatitudes saying to us?

The world turned upside down…

Jesus is shattering the old link between prosperity and moral worth. The notion, which pervades the ancient world, and recur throughout the Scriptures, that good things happen to good people. He’s not the first, or the only one to make this point. In The Book of Job, that good, deserving man is healthy, wealthy, and wise, the father of many children, universally respected.

All of that is taken away from Job. But he remains faithful, loyal, and clings to his integrity. He does not understand what is happening to him, but he refuses to deny the truth of the God he has loved his whole life.

But The Book of Job is a parable, a story, and it ostensibly ends with the restoration of the moral order—Job is, at the end of the story, once again healthy, wealthy, and wise, universally respected, the father of many new children.

Of course, if the Book were not a parable, Job would still be mourning the children lost, the shattering of his relationship with his wife, who urged him to “curse God and die,” and the hollowness of his friendships, as demonstrated by the facile rebukes his so-called comforters offer him, to find where he erred, and beg forgiveness—and then God will promptly end the pain.

Like Job, Jesus knows better. And he’s warning us: There is no connection between our status as children of God and our financial resources, our social status, our secular power or status.

None.

The Prosperity Gospel, which seeks to con Christians into believing that there is, is the single most dangerous heresy in Christian history, because while most of the other famous heresies reflect failed efforts to grapple with the nature of Jesus’s relationship with the Father, this one tells you that if you are rich, successful and healthy, you stand well with God. And if you are not—well, too bad for you.

Jesus has rejected that ancient belief—more, he has inverted it. It’s part of the world that Jesus turns upside down. Not to exalt misery for its own sake, but to teach us the love of God and of neighbor, love that goes beyond intellectual precept into action.

In Jesus’s day, the way to wealth was filled with compromise and collaboration with the “domination system” of the Roman occupiers.

In our own day, we are similarly hemmed in by our choices—the television show The Good Place points out that acts that are on their face innocent—buying organic fruit, for example, or a cellphone or a tablet—enmeshes us in the exploitation of workers around the globe, and in their suffering.

Like Jesus’s audience in today’s Gospel, we cannot find a morally pure way to exist in our society.

But we can oppose what Gore called the “abiding sources of misery and strongholds of tyranny.” The call of Christ was not, first and foremost, to believe a doctrine, but to live a life. The first name of the Church was simply “the Way.”

And that way calls us as to live a life that is grounded in love. Not an emotion, but a promise. A promise to treat everyone we engage with as enshrine in our hearts and a fundamental concern for the well being of every other person—and to work in our various ways what to make as nearly as impossible as it may be the exploitation of the weaker by the stronger.

If we are complacent in our wealth, and believe it is ours because we are righteous—than woe on us indeed.

If we are full, and do not do not acknowledge our duty to do what we can to alleviate the suffering of the hungry—then, again, woe to us.

If we complacently rejoice, and just shut out the moral complexities and tangles of our interconnected, overly burdened planet, then, yes, woe to us.

Because when we do these things, we are closing our eyes to reality, and turning away from the costs of our comfort to others who are not as lucky as we are.

We would be part of the moral order Jesus repudiates—the simplistic notion that good things happen to good people, and that privilege equates to moral worth.

But if we use our privilege to work toward a more just world, to oppose exploitation and oppression, then we are alive to the inconvenient truths around us. If we truly wish to walk in the way, we must confront the fact that we are all tainted by the world we live in, and are all complicit in its violence and exploitation—but facing that fact and promising to try to build a better world means that we choose, by every act we take toward changing those conditions, large or small, we stand with the God whose redemptive love is over us and within us, and we will be answering, each in our own small way, God’s call to stand against the forces that crush the vulnerable and injure the little ones loved by God. [5]

And, when enough of us join in the effort, we just may see the world turn upside down.

The Kingdom of God is just that, and we are told that it is within us.

So let it out. Turn the world upside down.

And rejoice.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

____________________________

[1]-[3] Nadia Bolz-Weber, Shameless, at 5 (2019)
[4]Gore, The Reconstruction of Belief at 624 (1926).
[5] Gore, Christ and Society, at 165, et seq. (1928).

In The Castle of the Forest Sauvage

We begin:

An older boy, leading his foster-brother, angrily tries to fly a hawk, who flaps away, itself in a mood. The hawk will not be taken willingly, and heads deeper into the dark, frightening forest near the boys' home, the Forest Sauvage. The older boy, angry at himself, his brother (who warned him), and the hawk, storms off home. The boy follows the hawk into the depths of the Forest Sauvage, and pursues, even as the shadows lengthen.

The world changes.

***

As a better writer than me once put it, " I really didn't know. I wasn't sure. You lose sight sometimes. Thank you!"

I've been revisiting T.H. White's original, uncut, unblemished, "fully rounded, bright and done," The Sword in the Stone, and it is every bit as glorious--no, it is far more glorious than when I read it as a child. Seriously, it is a beautiful book.

But you must read it alone and apart from the compilation volume The Once and Future King. Brilliant though that volume is, comprising the two sequels, and a final book, The Candle in the Wind, that only appears in the tetralogy, the edits White made to Sword lose much of the grand daylight sense of whimsy and anachronistic comedy that make the original so special. The lost set pieces--Merlyn dueling Madam Mim (White's original cries out for Michelle Gomez to play the mad, funny, beautiful-but-deadly villainess), the rescue of Morgan le Faye's captives (Morgan as a jaded 30's sophisticate (Constance Bennett, perhaps?), whose sunglasses blot out what she doesn't want to see), and the lyrical visit to the kindly snake T. Natrix--the inserted materials from the aborted The Book of Merlyn are well worth having, but not in Sword. They are a harder, older man's writing, the writing of a man whose hope in his kind is flagging, and the sunset of that uncompleted volume is bright, but not like the dawn-filled sky of White's first Arthurian romance.

No. Read the original or go home. And do not watch the Disney movie. Wait for a proper adaptation (Michelle Gomez required!), or read the original--aloud, if you can; this marks two books I have read aloud to myself for the savor of the language. The Christmas dinner and Boxing Day boar hunt are beautiful in ways that I simply missed as a child, as a youth, as a young man. Now, ensconced in middle age, I laugh at Sir Ector--but for him, too. King Pellinore, Robin Wood, and, most surprisingly, William Twyti, King Uther's gnarled and wiry huntsman, strike different chords in me now. (I defy you to read aloud the boar hunt, and remain dry-eyed at “He [Twyti] said, 'Good dog, Beaumont the valiant, sleep now, old friend Beaumont, good old dog.' Then Robin's falchion let Beaumont out of this world, to run free with Orion and roll among the stars.” )

But White's use of language is extraordinary throughout. Here he is, setting a scene, and creating a song another man would simplify two decades later:

These marvels were great and comfortable ones, but in the old England there was a greater still. The weather behaved itself.
In the spring all the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang; in the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed; in the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory; and in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush

Such gems are freely strewed by White throughout the novel; here's White describing the young Arthur (called the "Wart" because he's illegitimate (so everyone thinks), after falling asleep in the woods:

The boy slept well in the woodland nest where he had laid himself down, in that kind of thin but refreshing sleep which people have when they begin to lie out of doors. At first he only dipped below the surface of sleep, and skimmed along like a salmon in shallow water, so close to the surface that he fancied himself in air. He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars
above his face, whirling on their silent and sleepless axis, and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and he heard small changes in the grass. These little noises of footsteps and soft-fringed wing-beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened or interested him, so that he moved to see what they were (but never saw), then soothed him, so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left him altogether as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling into the scented turf, into the warm ground, into the unending waters under the earth

Not a bit of showing off to be seen; the similes enrich and convey the feeling White wishes to convey, concretely.

Among all the character beats (on Sir Ector's "proper" son, Kay: “He was one of those people who would be neither a follower nor a leader, but only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it.”), apothegms, the comedy, the call-backs (or forward; Merlyn lives backwards in time), and may have been Sherlock Holmes in the 1890s), comes the single best advice I have found in a book:

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you.”

There speaks a man who has battled his own demons with curiosity, books, keen observation.

And then read the rest, The Witch in the Wood, The Ill-Made Knight, and then return to the omnibus, and read The Candle in the Wind. And don't neglect The Book of Merlyn, because this last gasp of White's Arthurian genius, as the Second World War engulfed, and threatened, everything he believed in, White manages one last affirmation of humanity:

He [Arthur, now in old age, the night before his final battle] caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldome, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate's. Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had

The Book of Merlyn closes with a dedication to Sir Thomas Malory, and asks prayers for his soul, and that of his humble disciple (White himself), who now "lays down his books, to fight for his kind."

The books are extraordinary, unlike any others in literatureI have read.

The story begins with a boy, chasing a hawk, into the Forest Sauvage, where he meets an old man (or a young man?) who will be his tutor.

Begin.

“You Have Kept the Good Wine Until Now”: A Sermon on John 2:1-11

[Note: Due to technical glitches, this sermon text lacks the usual links, block-quote formatting, and italicization. As Anglocat Central is moving within the next two weeks, I hope these difficulties will be solved by then. Apologies for any lack of clarity as to what is quoted and what is original material.]

Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, New York City
January 20, 2019

Long ago, in a town called Cana, a man named Jesus attended a wedding. He was a religious leader of a kind, and those who were trying to walk the way with him, to live a life in harmony with their truest, best selves, joined him at the wedding.

Well, as seems to fit a perennial pattern, the guests got drunk, and the wine ran out.

Having been a host, and a guest, at weddings, let me assure you that a large number of drunk people who are suddenly cut off tend to become less than ideal guests.

Normally, this wouldn’t fall within Jesus’s purview. But His mother was there, also, and that’s when the trouble begins.

“They have no more wine,” she tells him, and his first response is a neat little blocking shot; basically, he says, “Why is this my problem,” and then adds, a little inconsistently, that his hour had not yet come anyway. Also, he addresses her as “Woman,” which I’m sure helped out. I tried that little gambit when I was a kid after hearing the story in religion class, and I’m only here to tell you about it, because Mom was too busy laughing to smite me.

Mary is unflappable. “Do whatever he tells you to do,” she says to the servants, and she exits the story. So not only does Jesus make a whole new supply of wine, it’s so much better than what they’ve been serving that the steward thinks the bridegroom is an idiot for serving the cheap stuff first, and wasting this great wine on these drunk unruly guests who would find antifreeze perfectly acceptable by this point in the evening.

It’s a strangely mundane, almost funny, beginning to Jesus’s public ministry, the first of his signs—the Gospel’s word for miracles—being the saving of a party, because Mom put him on the spot.

But it’s only funny if we look at it through modern eyes. The bridegroom will be disgraced if he fails in hospitality, and Mary knows this. Jesus doesn’t deny her claim on him, and he doesn’t take it lightly that she is trying to salvage the event from disaster.

And I really wasn’t kidding about how that drunken crowd could have turned angry.

In other words, a celebration, a feast, a social norm of bounteous hospitality which the guests were entitled to expect, were all about to be violated, with all kinds of social consequences—humiliation and social ostracism of the bridegroom and his new wife, spilling onto their families. Loss of social cohesion, of the glue that holds the community together.

Instead, the bridegroom ends up with an enhanced reputation for exuberant, open-handed generosity—he doesn’t run out, and in fact, he doesn’t serve cheap wine as the event’s going into overtime! Nothing but the finest for his guests! In an honor culture, that kind of generosity can make you a legend.

Oh, it was just a small town wedding, not an epochal historical event, but Jesus’s bemused intervention saves the community from fracturing.

As our own National community, based on unwritten norms sometimes feels as if it is fracturing. We can all point to different instances of community fractures, but my attention was drawn by this weekend’s march for life, disfigured by a group of high school students who surrounded a Native American man, chanting a song as part of the Indigenous People’s March. The videos of students from Covington Catholic High School, ostensibly there to urge the protection of life, aggressively chanting “Build that wall” at Nathan Philips, a Native American veteran of the Vietnam War, paint a picture of mere anarchy, a center that cannot hold.[1]

It’s a long way from the Wedding at Cana, but these days, Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming,” resonates in my mind:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

It feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it?

The federal government has been shut down since December 22—tomorrow, when we celebrate the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will mark the end of the first month of the longest shutdown in American history.

800,000 federal employees, furloughed, or, worse, forced to work indefinitely without pay.

The State of the Union Address?

Cancelled, or indefinitely postponed, or reduced to a written homework assignment.

Which is not a bad reflection of the fractious and dysfunctional—no, sorry, it isn’t even dysfunctional, it is simply non-functional state of the union.

And the focus of all this chaos? A wall, to separate us from our neighbors to the South. After all, as Robert Frost said, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

But Frost didn’t say that. He was quoting his neighbor, with whom he annually repaired the wall between their homes, who had adopted the maxim from his late father. Frost’s response is “to

Wonder if I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down."

On this Sunday before Martin Luther King’s Feast Day, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you to think of whom we are walling in, or walling out. Of to whom we are like to give offence, with our wall to only one border, while the northern border remains free and open. Of the harms this internecine war is inflicting on us as a Nation, on those who wish to legally seek asylum, on those who look to us as a Nation to emulate, symbolized by the lady with the torch, a beacon of welcome.

That’s closed too, by the way.

Actually, it isn’t, but that’s because New York State is keeping it open by bearing most of the costs.

The ostensible subject of this stand-off, the Wall, is both a national security policy debate, and a symbol. I’ll leave the policy and politics to those who are competent to address that, draw your attention to the symbol.

A wall is a symbol of divisions that are perpetuated without any real reason for them, as Frost delicately suggests in “Mending Wall.” In Game of Thrones, which some advocates of the proposed southern border wall have pointed to as an analogy, the Wall turns out to separate those who need each other to survive, and, when true danger threatens those who rely on its protection, it is too brittle to withstand the real threat.

As a symbol, whether at Jericho, in Game of Thrones—even in Robert Frost—the Wall comes tumbling down.

That’s because division and discord are not our natural state. Dysfunction, and stalemate are not who we are called to be.

Systems do not shutdown when they are healthy, but when toxicity has reached a critical mass.

And so we have to ask ourselves, what can we learn today from Jesus’s giving in to his mother’s concerns so long ago at Cana?

Generosity of spirit, for one thing. As far as we can tell, Mary doesn’t draw any attention to Jesus from the bridegroom, the bride, or their families. She just goes to her son, and presents him with the problem. And, for all of his not feeling that this is the proper place for him to begin his ministry, he does it.

The time may not be right, but the need is real, so Jesus responds with generosity of spirit, with a sign that nobody other than his friends see, and that the bridegroom gets the credit for.

Second, a sense of humor. Yes, everything I said about the duties of hospitality in the ancient world is true, but there’s a slightly sardonic edge to Jesus here. His words to Mary are slightly barbed, and of course his wine makes the bridegroom’s best taste like the cheap stuff. He throws himself into salvaging the wedding feast, but almost like he cant believe that this is his first sign. I can’t help but think that he had to smile as he watched the restoration of the social fabric, the reproachful steward, that he had to contain his laughter. I think he enjoyed this one—no big splash, no demons to cast out, just some big jugs of water, and a mysterious benefactor who manages to use them to restore harmony to the town.

Third, we don’t have to be miracle workers. In the reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul lists various gifts we are all given, and various ways in which we can serve—but he then adds, “All of these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually, just as the Spirit chooses.”

In other words, we all have our unique gifts, our abilities, we all have our passions, and what we do with them tells us a lot about who we are. But even more importantly, if we use our gifts, our passions, to reach across divides, to make connections, to build others up, rather than tear them down, we can find ourselves looking across our divides as sisters and brothers, rather than as strangers. We can forgive, and accept forgiveness for hurts inflicted on us and by us. We can learn that hate is always foolish, and love is always wise. That takes generosity of spirit.

If we can laugh with each other, at our own foibles, and at the incongruities of life, we can see our commonalities, our shared humanity, and not our differences, and hear what we have to offer one another.

And with that recognition that we can let go of preconceptions and of fear, and find that we are all the beloved children of the same God, and that those divides, those toxins don’t get the last word.
We do.

You do, as the beloved children of God.

In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.

[1] Reportage subsequent to the preparation of this sermon has provided more context for the encounter between the studeants and Mr. Philips. The students appear to have been on the receiving end of hostile remarks from a third group, leading Phillips to interpose himself between the groups, in an effort to deescalate the situation. See Sarah Mervosh & Emily S. Rueb, “Fuller Picture Emerges of Viral Video Between Native American Man and Catholic Students,” The New York Times, Jan. 20, 2019, at p. A 13.

Don't Dwell on What Has Past Away, Or What is Yet To Be....

We are in a liminal moment.
Neither here nor there.
2018, with its joys, woes, losses, gains, pains and joys, and everything else--
its time is drawing to a close,
and with it, a new year, as yet unformed, uncharacterized, awaits,
its blank pages inviting our words and deeds to fill them.
It's all up to you, and me, all of us where we go from here.

So hear some wisdom from Leonard Cohen:

You can add up the parts
You won't have the sum
You can strike up the march
There is no drum
Every heart, every heart to love will come
But like a refugee

And one more, from the Bard:

Not a whit; We defy augury.
There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
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.

And one last, again from the late Mr. Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)
That's how the light gets in

May 2019 find you ready, ready to love and forgive--including yourselves. Happy New Year; thanks for coming on the prowl with me in 2018.

"Bunnies! Bunnies, It Must Be Bunnies!": Return to Watership Down

Er, no. Sorry, Anya. Let's try again:



Rather, I was thinking of the late Richard Adams's Watership Down, adapted by Netflix and BBC 1 recently in a splendidly dark, faithful manner (with, admittedly, a little nip here, a little tuck there). None of the changes are terribly plot-altering, although one rabbit who survived in the original gets a heroic death in the adaptation.

Now, if you were, as I was, a child in the 1970s, and had, as I did, a passion for books, odds are that you read Watership Down before you were ready for it. Or, if you were a little bit younger, you were traumatized by the 1978 animated movie. (Oddly,I missed the film, even though Watership was a favorite book. Still haven't seen it.) I remember the suspense, and the need to see what happened next driving me on, and on--even when the legends of El-ahrairah and Rabscuttle broke the momentum. From Fiver's first prophetic vision, until the bittersweet ending, I was stuck to this book until I finished it. Like Dracula and The Three Musketeers, Watership Down transported me into a bigger world than a Long Island boyhood would lead you to imagine. Throw in T.H. White and Mark Twain, and you have a portrait of the Anglocat as young, er, boy, actually.

So, as you can imagine, I watched this adaptation with considerable interest.

I'm going to start by emphasizing the wonderful work done by the script and the cast--distilling Adams's long novel into four hour long episodes and keeping almost all of it intact is a remarkable feat. The storyline doesn't skip any of the major set-pieces, and the cast build the relationships between our heroes (and our villains) swiftly. Nicholas Hoult (Fiver), James McEvoy (Hazel, his older brother), and John Boyega (Bigwig) are the three stalwarts who do the main lifting among the Sandleford rabbits, though the ingenious Blackberry (a very good Miles Jupp), and the inimitable Olivia Coleman as Strawberry also shine. At first, Hazel and Bigwig are in tension over who should lead, with Bigwig thinking the notion of "Hazel-rah" to be ridiculous--until Bigwig's distrust in Fiver, and thus in Hazel, nearly leads to his death. From then on, these three very different characters form a mutually loyal troika, determined to protect the members of their new warren.

As a fan of Peter Capaldi (of course as the Doctor, but check out The Thick of It, or even more compellingly, The Hour), I was delighted to see him as the irascible, but ultimately friendly gull Kehaar. Yes, Capaldi's Scottishness is a long way from Kehaar's Eastern European accent in the novel--but Capaldi captures the defensiveness, the vulnerability of the injured bird with comedic brio, and ultimately, his affection for his furry friends. At the beginning of the last episode, Kehaar gets his "crowning moment of awesome" when he swoops down on General Woundwort to remind him of just why rabbits fear birds, especially large angry ones.

Speaking of Woundwort, Ben Kingsley does a fine job with our Mad Efrafan leader, and brings a complexity and a rage to the part that is truly formidable. Bigwig's climactic battle with Woundwort, and our last glimpse of the General are. . . perfect.

Fiver is not given what Adams gave as his climactic moment--eerily expressing sorrow for Vervain's and the invader's imminent death, and drive them to retreat or surrender by his calm certainty--but a variant on Hazel's big moment. Any more would spoil a lovely moment so...go watch it yourselves.

Some have criticized the animation. I am tempted to reply with Bigwig's response to Woundwort in the Honeycomb, but will simply say: Seriously? Yes, it's imperfect, but it works, and the script, the vocal talents of superb actors, and the storytelling had me 15 minutes in.

But then, the book has held me much longer.

What Reason Have You to Be Merry? A Sermon on Luke 1: 46-56

[Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church, New York City
December 23, 2018.]

What right have you to be merry?

What reason have you to be merry?

So asked Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, 175 years ago tomorrow, and maybe, just maybe it’s about time we took that question seriously.

After all, the story was published in 1843, and we’ve pretty much just assumed that it was bad-tempered spite on the part of old Ebenezer to ask it.

And maybe that’s true. He is, after all, the villain of the story as well as its protagonist, and his salvation takes the three spirits of Christmas some pretty heavy lifting.

On the other hand, villains often are the dark mirrors of ourselves, the part of us we reject as unworthy, the parts of our true selves that we repress because we can’t bear to acknowledge them. We all want to be our best selves, kind, brave, generous but prudent. We act the parts of the people we want to be, and mostly we try to live up to that image. But that image—the “Glittering Image” as Susan Howatch called it—isn’t our real self either, because it’s only a part of the whole that comprises each and every one of us.

This darker half of ourselves, the unacknowledged fears, desires, and thoughts, can have a kind of wisdom that we shut out of our minds.

After all, what reason does Scrooge’s nephew Fred have to be merry? As Scrooge points out, every Christmas for Fred is “but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against” poor Fred.

For that matter, what reason does Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit, who applauds Fred’s defense of Christmas have to be merry? What reason do Cratchit’s wife and six children have to be merry? They are desperately poor, living on the slender salary Scrooge provides Bob. Mrs. Cratchit struggles to provide decent meals, sometimes even with meat, for her husband and her children, who are already becoming introduced to the life of the working poor in early Victorian London. Their lives are dirty, laborious, and their surroundings ramshackle. And her youngest son, Tiny Tim, is visibly failing, and very likely to die.

What right do Fred or the Cratchits have to be merry? What are they celebrating? Isn’t Scrooge right, when he caustically suggests that Fred’s celebration is simply driving him deeper in debt, allowing him to postpone the moment when he is forced to confront his failures and, at long last, set his house in order?

And we, here, today. Our Government is shut down, our politics are toxic, with the poisonous ooze of hatred coursing through the veins of the body politic. And we can’t pretend that because we’re in New York that this poison can’t effect us. Seventeen years ago, our skyline was changed forever, nearly 3,000 people died, and 6,000 were injured in an act of terrorism the reverberations of which are still vibrating through the fabric of our Nation.

And the tide of home grown hatred has lapped to the very doors of St. Barts. Two weeks ago, when I was standing on the steps greeting parishioners as they came inside for the 11:00 service, one of our ushers called me to the front door nearest to 51st Street. There, etched in the door in red pen, were two swastikas. Right outside. Right here. At St. Barts.

What right have we to be merry? What reason have we to be merry?

Mary and Elizabeth live in a time of terror, of ethnic hatred. The land of Israel occupied, Roman soldiery brutally enforcing the Emperor’s order, extorting whatever they wanted from the people living under occupation, and tax collectors doing the same. The religious establishment tainted and corrupt, complicit with the occupying forces, and life dependent on submission to brute force, with no real hope for justice.

Even Mary, Jesus’s mother, knew from her own experience the fear of death by execution. We are told in Matthew’s Gospel that when it became known that Mary was pregnant, that Joseph decided to save her life from a death by stoning by taking on himself the shame of what he believed was her crime.[1] Only after this remarkable act of mercy did he receive the illumination that led him to welcome her as his bride.

Her cousin Elizabeth was granted the gift of a child late in life, but at the time of Mary’s visit featured in today’s Gospel, her husband remained mute, from causes she did not know. The future of a widow—and Zechariah’s age and his new infirmity had to have her concerned for him—was extremely precarious, as was the future of Elizabeth’s child.

And yet, the meeting of the two women is joyful. Not merely the happiness of two relatives meeting after a time of separation, either. No, this is a meeting marked with the solemn joy of those who see that history, which may be, as Nicholas Meyer wrote, “replete with turning points,” is at a turning point like no other, and that these marginalized women—Elizabeth, long thought barren, and Mary, whose child nearly cost her her life—are the catalysts for what is about to begin.

About to begin, I say, but in fact, Mary presents it as a fait accompli, a thing that is already accomplished. A destiny fulfilled. Hear her words:

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

Mary is not speaking of things to come, but as things accomplished. She believes—no, she knows—that the intervention of God into the world through the birth of Jesus will by its very occurrence create the very changes she describes.

Elizabeth knows it too, as witnessed by the fact that the older woman defers to the younger, and forthrightly tells her that she is “blessed among women” because she “believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

And, in fact, so it has been. Rome fell, but here we are in a national landmark that is in fact a sanctuary raised to honor the child borne by Mary, and I am speaking these words under a beautiful painting of her and her child. Yes, evil still exists. Yes, discord and strife tear at the world. But they are not normative, not what we consider the measure of right conduct. Nobody reveres Herod, Pontius Pilate, Annas or Caiaphas. They are only known at all by most people because of their roles in the story that begins tomorrow night.

The old brutal dreams of might makes right, of tribe and power defining what we call the good has been on the run ever since Jesus showed us a better way, since God so loved the world that She offered her only begotten Son to be with us, not to lead our tribe to supremacy, but to lead us all to the deeper wisdom of love. Not just a wishy-washy ethic of sentimentality, but a way of life. That Way, as the disciples and their direct successors called what the world terms Christianity, involves a commitment to seeing, every day, the beauty of a Child of God, in every person, even when we are divided by them. That Way has survived empires, wars, corruption of its so-called leaders, and still is going strong. It doesn’t need an army. It never has. It has you, each and every one of you, who is here, not out of compulsion or social pressure, but because you want to be. Because the Way speaks to your heart.

Scrooge had a kind of wisdom, but it was of the lower kind—pragmatic wisdom, how to survive in a hostile world. Fred and the Cratchits refused to accept that the world was by its nature hostile. Their wisdom was deeper than his.

What right have you be merry?

The right of a child of God, in the world created by God.

What reason have you to merry?

The best reason in the world: that we are here again together, about to celebrate the end of those old, dark ways, and to repel the dark with the Light of the World.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
————————————————————
[1] See John Wirenius, “The Man of Mercy,” http://stbarts.org/worship/sermons/the-man-of-mercy/ (December 18, 2016).

Hat-Tip: Words and Music

I write to music. It can't be the music that can overwhelm you, and compel engrossment into itself alone. But it needs to resonate with my mood. Not something so powerful as to distract me, but something that jibes with the general emotional state I'm evoking in myself, and hope to share with my readers. Phineas at Bay was largely written to film scores, mostly John Barry, specifically his score to Mary, Queen of Scots (1971).

This year, this parlous year, in which division and distrust have increasingly marred the country I love, I have preached on those themes, and on love--not sentimental goop, but real love, that is, a fundamental commitment to the well-being of the other, however you describe that "other," as the only hope to heal our divisions, and our world.

Just as I have written books because I myself needed them to exist, so too I have preached, as I often do, the sermons I need to hear. I have made myself confront the sins to which I all too easily can fall prey--arrogance in my sense of rightness, self-certainty, and righteous indignation. I have sought to call myself, as well as those who hear me, to the better angels of my own nature.

Along that path, this year, I have written several sermons to the accompaniment of Murray Gold's "The Shepherd's Boy" above. Somehow this piece speaks to me in this year of discord. Perhaps because the long build, the deceptive gentleness of the theme, its reaching a crescendo long delayed, speaks to me of the rebuilding, the re-weaving of the fabric of a nation fraying in ways I never expected to see ours fray.

I won't deny that Steven Moffat's recent writing seems to me to be seeking to that same basic mission, with his repeated emphasis on the virtues of courage and kindness. Ultimately, they are what I think we need: the courage to see ourselves in the other, and the kindness to trade them as we would treat ourselves. It is not easy to forego the luxury of righteous indignation, and choose instead the harder path of love, but, oh, I am trying. And I have many companions on the way--not just my friends and colleagues at St, Barts and throughout the Episcopal Church, but also friends and family writ large. But to my surprise, fiction, storytellers--often authors whose work I haven't visited in many years have come to my aid--T. H. White has more to say to me in my fifties than he did when I was a child, and I learned much from him then. Mark Twain and Henry James, Jean Anouilh and Jean Giradoux, have flared back into relevance this year. They have been good companions on the journey.

So too have Gold and Moffat.

I have read less theology than usual, but more stories, more parables, and I have found in them the resources to do that which has been needful, if only to myself. Robertson Davies's reminder to "never overlook the charm of narrative for the human heart" has come true for me this year. And so being an English major has turned out to be eminently practical after all. As has a taste for music.