Caught by the Light

May We Not Lose Even One

2011-11-22T07:30:00.000-08:00

I am reminded of a reading recently in the Daily Office, where Jesus, not unlike the Ghost of Christmas Present, points to a child as an example. In these days of political madness, widespread struggle, commercial frenzy, and holiday stress, his words are for me like balm to an open wound in our common body.

From a new article at Episcopal Café.

The Way of Compassion

2011-11-14T16:16:00.001-08:00

The Way of Compassion in Christianity
A Reflection

Delivered at the
Building Bridges of Understanding Series:
Interfaith Understanding and Social Justice

Session Three: Compassion
Saturday, November 12, 2011

Creekside Room, Dominican University of California

I decided to approach the subject of compassion somewhat critically today – not because I believe compassion has no place in Christianity (I believe quite the opposite, as you will see), but because Christianity, particularly in the West, sometimes treats compassion as an adjunct to its theological premises, a sort of step-child to the full-blooded doctrines, canonical strictures, and theologies that have grown up over the years a bit like ivy growing up and clambering unchecked over old buildings.

At first glance, compassion seems to have a relatively small place in the heart of Christian tradition – the word itself appears in Christian Scripture only eighty times in one widely used contemporary translation (NRSV), and it almost always is associated with the divine response to human suffering and need. "Turn, O Lord! How long?" writes one Psalmist (90:13), "Have compassion on your servants!" For the ancient Israelites, who suffered frequent invasion and periodic exile, suffering was part of their spiritual landscape as a people, and the need for compassionate mercy and help from their God was essential to their hope and spirituality. But does that readily translate into the imperial Church of the later Roman Empire, the expansion in Northern Europe and development of a uniform Catholic tradition, the time of the Crusades, the Reformation, or, for that matter American Christianity of the twenty-first century?

To further illustrate my point, I might as well talk about my wardrobe – sometimes it's best to describe something that might prove to be a bit of a distraction, in any case! You are not likely to see too many Christians marching around Marin these days in a habit and wearing a funny hat. Even amongst those, you are unlikely to encounter Christians in habits who also happen to be married, as I am, and with children. As a member of a relatively recently founded order in The Episcopal Church, The Brotherhood of Saint Gregory, I've inherited a hybridized tradition that draws on numerous sources, so simple questions sometimes receive complex answers!

Late this summer, while walking outside my parish in Mill Valley on a warm, sunny afternoon, an SUV rolled up behind me with the windows down, and from inside, I heard a voice say, "Shabbat Shalom." When the vehicle passed someone else inside said, "But wait! He's wearing a cross!" It was too easy to imagine the comical question mark hanging over the SUV as it turned the corner on its way. It's that kind of puzzlement, I suppose, most Christians, and indeed many religious traditions can encounter in the complexities of today’s world. The hat is not, of course, a kippa or a yamaka, but a zucchetto – literally it means "little squash" in Italian. It originated as head gear for Christian monks to cover their tonsures in the Middle Ages – probably for warmth in inclement weather – and later evolved into ceremonial garments for religious orders and clergy. The white habit is more ancient, tracing its way back to the earliest Christians who were dressed in white tunics as they were received into Christian community from the waters of baptism – a symbol of their spiritual rebirth, a sign of the new, cleansed life in the Risen Christ they had embraced as their old selves died with Christ on the cross. The cincture for me, a novice brother, is a symbol of my being yoked to a promise of obedience, the first step on a journey towards the three evangelical or Gospel counsels taken on as vows in ancient monastic traditions: poverty, chastity, and obedience.

I share all of this with you for two reasons. The first is to illustrate a Christian problem, and perhaps a wider problem of any longstanding religion, and that is that we tend, over time, to accumulate and practice layer upon layer of tradition. This practice of accumulation often buries the essential truths of Christianity, which brings me to my second and primary point this morning: that we can so often lose the importance of the "why" of our accumulated traditions, we can too easily lose the proverbial forest for the trees.

My eight-year-old son reminds me of this repeatedly these days when he starts the "Why" game, in which every answer to a question is met with another "Why?" In the West, Christianity of all kinds, ranging from Roman Catholicism to hardline Protestant fundamentalism and everything in between, including my own Anglicanism, can forget to play this critical game and end up propping up an inherited tradition without cultivating its heart, its core. So, why the funny clothes, and, for that matter, why the prayers and the practices and the stories and the theologizing? And that brings me back to the subject of compassion.

The ancient Greek translators of Hebrew scriptures and the Greek writers of Christian texts of the Bible that we commonly call the New Testament used the verb "splagchnizomai" which is derived from the Greek word for intestines or guts. In the ancient Near-Eastern mind, the seat of human emotion, the center of the human heart, was not where we locate it today with the muscle pump in the chest, but in the digestive tract, the bowels even. Compassion, for these ancient authors, was what we might call a visceral response to human suffering, and being a verb, it implied an almost instinctive, active response – the response of a parent to a suffering child, for instance; of a leader to a leaderless crowd (as it is employed to describe Jesus' compassion in the gospel narratives), or amongst the early Christian authors and expanding in later Catholic theology, of a God to a suffering humanity and cosmos.

Splagchnizomai, compassion, is the primordial response of the divine to us as a people, the visceral birth, if you will, of what early Christian communities recognized as divine love. It is not so much that Christian tradition and theology and doctrine demonstrate to us that compassion is a way to be Christian. Rather, Christians argue that it is only through the eyes of compassion and its full manifestation in mindful love that any theology, tradition, or doctrine is to be tested; it is only through compassion that the accretions of our tradition make any sense both in their interpretation and application. Put simply, I would argue that compassion is the heart of the Christian Way, and without it, we have only a hollow shell of a religion. We utter almost blithely, quoting scripture, when we say "God is love," but there is no more profound theological statement anywhere. Our struggle is only to embrace this more fully in every aspect of our lives.

Many of the problems we see in contemporary Christianity – from a dangerous idolization of inherited institution on the one hand, to a radical disregard for simple moral common sense and a willful deafness to the complexities of human suffering on the other – are the result of losing touch with our central call to compassion, the result of ossifying out hearts with weighty tradition and rigid ideologies. This is an old spiritual problem. The Hebrew prophetic tradition, in which Jesus squarely stood and taught, spoke of the need to replace our hearts of stone with hearts of living flesh again. Salvation, an oft-abused word employed too often these days to ostracize, judge, and condemn, in reality points back to this restoration of compassionate living, this healing of our core humanity. A world of mutual compassion undergirds the peaceable kingdom the prophet Isaiah hopes for, and Jesus speaks of a kingdom of God in which all are fed, all are free: a place more precious than any wealth or power the world can provide. And each act of mercy, of compassion, helps build and usher in this kingdom among us.

Jesus summarizes the Law of his Jewish heritage as love of God and love of neighbor, a love that clearly flows from compassion. We love, as an old children's song I learned standing around the organ in a little mission congregation in the Midwest, because God first loved us. Our response of thanksgiving to God's love for us is to be compassionate with one another and everything around us. This means the funny clothes I wear are meant to serve as a reminder to me and to others about the compassion I am to share with others, a witness to the love that flows forever from the heart of God. It's a love that we argue transcends death, a compassion that will embrace death if necessary so that others may have life, a love, a compassion that gives life and abides, in our central Christian practice of communion, in the deep union with everything that is and the Divine Life. Likewise, the old vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience are disciplines for Christian community not as ascetic practices for the sake of spiritual pride, but as a means to live more fully into what we used to call in Latin, caritas, charity in the old language, or love and compassion and we more often use these days.

So that's all fine as a heady theology or idea. How do we put it to practical good use? In one Gospel story a lawyer well versed in the Hebrew tradition puts this question to Jesus in response to his central command to love God and love neighbor: "Who is my neighbor?" In other words, to whom am I to show compassion?

Jesus responds with the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan, which like many of his parables is filled with irony. The Samaritan, who above the ostensibly faithful religious authorities that carefully pass by on the other side of the road to maintain their ritual purity, is the only person to show compassion to a man who is beaten and left for dead by bandits. Samaritans were considered the dregs of Jesus' time, the outsiders who, to the authorities of the ancient Israelites, held only a distorted and corrupted version of their common faith. Jesus lifts him up as an example that not only undermines the lawyer's self-justifying motives in posing the question, but also illustrates that it can be the most assiduously religious who sometimes have the most to learn about the central call of compassion, of love. As a matter of fact, we insiders and outwardly religious sorts might learn compassion best from those we most easily ignore or ostracize!

In another famous story, Jesus talks of a stubborn widow who seeks justice from a corrupt judge. It is her insistence that eventually wears him down, and he grants her petition even though he has no heart for her cause. Christians these days often imagine themselves at best imparters of compassion. We "do it" for others. What we can forget, however is that compassion always resides in a social context, and it is not always ours to give. What about compassion when we find ourselves, like the widow, on the raw end of the stick? Her example, I wonder, might tell us that insisting on compassion – even from the seemingly pathologically unjust – is an essential part of our call.

Last weekend, I drove into the City to visit Occupy San Francisco. A group from our parish were led there by a youth member who was first moved by their witness and their call for justice. As we spoke with people who had taken up residence in the growing tent town across the Ferry Building, I was struck by the words of one woman who saw her role as a witness to the powerful – not to tear them down, but to appeal to them for fairness, for justice. She reminded me of the widow in Jesus' story, a witness to the call of compassion – of healing the world from below. Our media is rife these days with criticisms of the psychopathological tendencies of some of the most wealthy elites whose amoral greed and selfish ambition led, with our government's complicity, the world economy and financial system to the edge of the abyss. The result is considerable suffering. This woman's witness is a reminder that beyond the mere judging and cries for justice is a call to appeal to the perpetrators for compassion. When we need it from the powerful, we ask for it. Just as I get calls almost every day from people on the margins seeking not only financial assistance but a compassionate ear.

What would society look like, I wonder, if we all regularly appealed to one another for compassion, for love in this vein? Our tendency towards litigation and legislation is the familiar capitalist and democratic response to the injustices of this or any age. But the Christian response, the Way of Compassion, is an appeal to re-humanize our relationships, to go for the gut, if you will, to summon forth that primordial visceral response to need and suffering, and through that response, to participate in the world's redemption.

Location:Dominican University of California

Falling Up(wards)

2011-07-26T22:49:00.000-07:00

A sermon delivered on
the Feast Day of Adelaide Case
July 19th, 2011
at the Summer Convocation of
the Brotherhood of Saint Gregory
Mt. Alvernia Retreat Center
Wappingers Falls, New York

by Richard E. Helmer, p/BSG

Just under two weeks ago, a devoted member of a neighboring parish gave me a copy of Richard Rohr's latest book. It was as timely a gift for me as it was gracious. In his new book, Rohr explores what he calls the two halves of our earthly pilgrimage: the first half being consumed with building up of self, of identity, of ego, of accumulating skills, goods, and achievements. The second half, and a half that not everyone undertakes, is of giving away, of turning our life over to service -- of turning to what we could call the religious life, in whatever manifestation of that life God summons us into.

The process of engaging this second half of life is what Rohr calls "Falling Upwards," hence the title of his new book. Seeing that title immediately took me back to the third grade in the small-town Midwest, sitting on the orange carpet with my classmates, listening with delight as Mrs. Klenda read to us Shel Silverstein's poetry, which later included this little gem called Falling Up:

I tripped on my shoelace
And I fell up --
Up to the rooftops,
Up over the town,
Up past the treetops,
Up over the mountains,
Up where the colors
Blend into the sounds.
But it got me so dizzy
When I looked around,
I got sick to my stomach
And I threw down.

Now I ask you: What could be a better description of the journey of the religious life?

It has only just dawned on me that Shel Silverstein was in his own fashion the first philosopher, if not the first theologian, I encountered as a child. He offers more than mere milk for infants. He pens, in his earthy, humourous way, solid spiritual food for young stomachs being weaned by grace.

Tripping on our worldly shoelaces and falling up in the religious life can indeed give us a sense of spiritual vertigo, and at times it makes me queasy. Does it you? As in the gospel passage we just heard, the world can turn topsy-turvy when we take on religious disciplines and community: what is secret is revealed, gifts become demands for service, and inner light becomes the illumination for the outer darkness. When I joined this journey with all of you just over a year ago, I was warned to expect to lose everything. The prospect was as terrifying as it was compelling, and I can say that unpleasant expectation has been more than fulfilled! But in surprising ways. What was lost, what is being lost, either returns more vital and vibrant because it truly matters, or it is shed forever for being truly worthless. These days I find everything from my my marriage to my family life to my ministry in the parish to the community in which I've been planted looking, feeling, tasting, and smelling very different than it did a year ago. And there is yet so much further to fall....so much further, I hope and suppose, to fall upwards.

Falling has a long and hallowed history in our tradition. But it often is painted in a negative light, whether it's popular notions of Augustine's musings on Original Sin or good old threats of hellfire and brimstone. It is easier, truly, to imagine ourselves falling down into the hands of an angry God who is all about wrath and punishment, easier to obey the gravity of our worldly fears and failures projected onto the divine...than it is to consider falling upwards into the transformative grace of a counter-intuitive, loving Savior. God, it seems, is either our severe, judging and punishing über parent, which leaves us forever infants crying for our spiritual milk; or God is the faithful Father and wise Mother calling us to grow up, to live into the grace we have been offered, to take on the solid food that has been placed before us in the feast of the Kingdom. The distance between these two understandings of the divine may well be a measure of our faith, either a faith built on fear or a faith built on love.

So we all fall indeed, but how we fall matters, and falling upwards, defying the gravitational logic of a cynical world bent on self-referential ego and trappings of power, demands much more than passivity in the midst of our imperfections. It demands action, self-emptying self-offering, and a commitment of nothing less than everything we are. In short, falling down is easier than falling up. That's why Christian vocation, however it manifests in our lives, is always the narrow, difficult road for each of us, and why we need community to pick us up, dust us off, and keep us on that road with grace leading the Way.

* * *

"In no area of life is it so true as in the area of religion that we are living suspended between two worlds -- a past that has gone and a future that is yet to be."

Adelaide Teague Case, whom we commemorate today, penned these words just over eighty years ago. She was a shining example, a light out from under a bushel, of what it means to fall up rather than down. After serving as a vibrant teacher at St. Faith's school for girls barely a stone's throw from here in Poukeepsie, she witnessed against the insipid sentimentality and Sunday morning sequestering of much of what passes as Christian education, and she soon ascended the ladder of brilliant secular academic achievement. But she, too, tripped on her worldly shoelaces and fell. She ultimately set aside an illustrious career as an esteemed professor and chair of religious education at Teacher's College, Columbia, to answer a call to the less-well-endowed, male-clerical-dominated world of Episcopal theological education. At the Episcopal Theological School, she became the first woman to be made full professor at an Episcopal seminary, where her radical insistence on putting the students' needs before professorial ambition and ego compounded her challenges in an institution more patriarchal than even early- to mid- twentieth-century secular academe. It is said students refused to take her classes at the seminary simply because she was a woman. But she was eventually recognized for her gifts to the Church, gifts which were almost uncountable as she served and taught all her life. From Women's Auxiliary lectures to organizing for peace in the 1930's and 1940's, she reflected to her generation and generations to come the gifts of Lady Wisdom -- that enigmatic, captivating figure in Proverbs, working constantly and often unassumingly in our midst -- another image of Christ hinted at by mystics and theologians from Julian to Anselm: transformative grace undaunted by our often narrow vision and blighted hope.

For Adelaide Case, that fall up into the paths of Lady Wisdom first began with a young adult conversion to the religious life -- she joined the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, a lay order of women committed to simplicity of life and social action. Maybe this move was initially provoked by chronic illness (she was diagnosed early with tuberculosis of the bones, which haunted her for much of her natural life), but it was ultimately nourished and sustained by the sacraments and a life devoted to prayer. By falling up, Dr. Adelaide, or Dr. A as she came to be lovingly known by some of her students, was long remembered -- like many saints -- not so much for her theology or academic writing, but by exhibiting a life deeply planted in Christ.

What remains striking to me about her writing, however, is how it continues to speak with prescience to our age today, and to us here and now gathered in religious community. In the same pages where she reflects on our being suspended in religion between two worlds, Adelaide Case opines that we generally in the Church talk about religious life just about as clearly and directly as we talk about sex -- which, of course is to say not very clearly nor very directly at all. At best in much of our society we tend to be voyeuristic about both.

I needn't begin you tell you, dear Brothers, about the way the religious often risk being treated as church ornaments. Romantic notions about the religious life projected on the vowed religious parallel the same sort of unfulfilled fantasies projected onto the characters in an episode of Desperate Housewives or The Tudors. In the past year, I've had to confront in people I serve odd but understandable fears, rumors hatched on golf courses even; worries that I might run off to the monastery, habit flapping in the wind, leaving my wife and son bereft at the side of the road. The apostolic religious, I've learned, make less sense to many of our sisters and brothers in Christ than the cloistered monastics, which I suppose makes us all the more dangerous: dangerous perhaps most of all to the voyeuristic approach to religion, an ever-present danger of the Anglican tradition. And yet that brings us back to the challenge of this afternoon's Gospel. The grace we have been given and the call we have received can ill afford our hiding our light under a bushel. And for those to whom much has been given, Jesus warns us, much is expected.

But the greatest wisdom of the religious life, Adelaide Case reminds us, is found not so much in our thinking, skills, or knowledge, our sophistication and erudition, or our cleverness or projects of power and influence. Rather it is found in devoted, faithful, practice of the Gospel of grace. In 1948, while on her death bed and enveloped in prayer, Dr. A received the sacraments daily. Her last reported words were simply,

"What can I do for you?"

I reckon she would recognize the charisms of this community, and be at home this week with us in prayer and Eucharist. She would understand our shared vocation in learning to live a life of service, planted in our various callings, struggling frequently, challenging ourselves and others to stop hiding the light of Christ under bushels, and cultivating more than sentimental Sunday morning spirituality. She would appreciate our shared labor, and our yearning journey to fall. . .to fall up. . .to fall upwards into the life of our beloved Christ.

Bibliography:

"Falling Up" from Falling Up by Shel Silverstein. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

Background on Adelaide Teague Case from Holy Women, Holy Men and the Talbot School of Theology website: http://www2.talbot.edu/ce20/educators/view.cfm?n=adelaide_case

"Religion and the child's life" from Dorothy Canfield Fisher & Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg (Eds.) Our children: A handbook for parents. New York: The Viking Press (1932), pp. 307-317.

Fully Seen

2011-03-30T15:05:00.001-07:00

Last Sunday's sermon on a favorite gospel story:

Listen to the audio

Wood print by Sadao Watanabe

An Argument Wears Thin

2011-03-24T23:36:00.001-07:00

It would seem in the late great debate of blessed unions we must either cast marriage as the linchpin of our civilization -- that to change our chosen definition of this institution signals our downfall;

Or that marriage is simply a means to an end, be it solving the "division" between the sexes, or right procreation -- a tool in either the human or divine toolbox to somehow fix us.

Sadly, neither idolatry nor utilitarianism make for good theology, nor do they disclose God's healing love for broken human hearts.

The Exclusionary Principle

2011-02-01T10:05:00.000-08:00

Today's daily office reading from Paul's Letter to the Galatians speaks to the current situation in the Anglican Communion:

They make much of you, but for no good purpose; they want to exclude you, so that you may make much of them.

4:17

The Witness to Humanity

2011-01-28T09:50:00.000-08:00

David Kato, voice for the voiceless, martyr for the marginalized, bore Christian witness for persecuted sexual minorities in Uganda and wider Africa.

His brutal murder echoes across the Anglican Communion, reminding us what is truly at stake in the controversies of these past years: lives, dignity, and a Gospel too often distorted by fear, prejudice, and hatred.

As with the martyrs of centuries past, Kato's voice seems to have more power in death than in life. An editorial in Uganda's largest independent newspaper shows a remarkable and undeniable shift is beginning, even in the face of dehumanizing legislation.

Kato is yet another witness among many who brings fresh meaning to the cross, and to Paul's unmistakable hope in Romans 14:8 -

If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.

May David's soul, the the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace.

Atheists and Incarnation

2010-12-24T20:33:00.001-08:00

Sermon for Christmas, 2010
Audio

It is striking to me this year just how odd the incarnation is. Odd as it is this time of year when we proclaim peace, and yet the commercial world comes to life with frenetic, stress-filled activity – all the more pronounced as the economy begins to find its feet again. Reassuring when at last our government ratifies a treaty that will take another step towards dismantling the dangerous legacy of the Cold War. Odd as we Christians gather to pray to the Christ Child while some of our more vociferous atheist sisters and brothers see Christmastide as a critical time to make more public statements – from billboards along highways in New York to a recent entry by Ricky Gervais on the Wall Street Journal blog – about how crazy some think we really are. Odd indeed that the story of a little baby born in a small town in Judea two thousand years ago – an image at face value that might be a little bit sweet and comforting – becomes a source of discomfort. Reassuring that the incarnation still means something – even to those who most heartily deny it any value or meaning in our post-enlightenment, post-Christian, post-modern, post-industrial, post-everything world. Odd that our messages of joy are lifted up at this time even as we know some whom we most dearly love face considerable suffering, trial, and even death. Reassuring that Jesus was born into this, too.

We Christians have wrestled with the oddity of the incarnation for as long as we’ve called ourselves “Christian.” The stories of Luke and Matthew and the theologizing of John are not finished bits of history or well-studied, carefully weighed measurements of empirical science. They reflect communities of Christians wrestling with the meaning of Jesus Christ and the stories that surrounded him; how he touched and continued to touch generation to generation the lives of people on spiritual pilgrimage. Atheists are right to refer to them as “myth,” but we understand it as myth in the very best sense of the word. They embrace one of the deep mysteries of our faith – a profound sense of “God with us” in the muck and straw of our stabled lives, in the fleshy, fallible and sometimes stinky nature of human existence. . .God with us in our best moments and – perhaps even more importantly – in our worst. We have wrestled with the oddity of a God who needed to be changed from soiled swaddles, vulnerable to disease, tyranny, and all the uncertainties every human being faces – so much so that our key doctrinal statements, our ancient Creeds, had to very clearly establish that Jesus was born of a woman and yet fully divine. It’s an offense to the ancient philosophical ideals of a perfect, unassailable God. It’s an offense to the elevated humanism of a parallel but equally ancient understanding of a godless, ultimately meaningless life. Together, they form a dualism that haunts us – a dualism that threatens to divorce us in our own hearts and minds from our bodies, that threatens to split the “spiritual” from the soil and grime and sensuality of this life, that puts God “out there” somewhere – either in the gaps of our knowledge (however vast they are!) or in some lofty, incredible heaven that defies logic and reason. Neither are big enough ideas to contain our God. Nor are they real enough.

The incarnation resolves this dualism – in fact, shatters it completely with the cries of a newborn, a newborn God, a newborn Reality that pulls the star dust and messiness of our lives into a cosmic womb and births it anew infused with divinity from before time. If at the one end of our Christian journey stands the cross with Jesus’ arms outstretched to a world in love, then at this end, we behold Jesus as a fragile embodiment of that same love. Fragile, because he is vulnerable to our cynical hearts and our tendency to dominate and control what we don’t understand. This divine love beholds all of our wanton, craven, messiness and embraces it – the cats outside my office fighting as I write this, the impatience of today’s line at the coffee shop or the grocery store, the homeless begging for a place at table, our irritation with our short existence, our impatient imperfections; our great art, our science and history, our civilizations, our cherished family stories, our striving for something magnificent in a capricious universe. This divine love beholds all of it and then deigns to be born into it, to become one with it, to embrace it so utterly that even God is somehow changed for us from a philosophical abstraction or a thundering, primitive caricature of a deity into an embodied, transformative presence that lives and acts in the very substance of our lives.

Our quibble with atheistic utterances that “God does not exist” is an old one rooted in incarnation. I don’t believe in the God they don’t believe in either. God does not exist as a provable, measurable thing, like a chair, or a desk. God is. God is the root of is-ness, says the birth of Jesus to me. Our humanity is because God has embraced it so utterly that every reality is part of God’s reality now. We can’t measure God empirically not because he is an absent watchmaker as our American deism would have it, but because every measurement itself is predicated on an assumption of reality that is God. Without God, there is no measuring stick. In fact, we Christians say, there would be nothing to measure. There would be nothing without God.

And so, Christmas reminds us, we are, too. More than mere existences, we are. We are touched by the divine hand much more than the outstretched reach of Adam to a bearded deity as in Michelangelo’s depiction of the old story in the Sistine Chapel. We are touched from head to toe, from birth to death, from virtue to foible, by a God who loves us so much that nothing would be left untouched. Our faith, then, is that our evolving lives are constantly and consistently infused with this blessing, so much so that our life – whether we choose to recognize it or not – hinges on this love, and there are no words adequate to describe this dependence, and no suffering, no pain, no work of humanity or crash of the cosmic dance can utterly break our bond with this God who is born into us, our DNA, our bones, our ancestry, our past, present, and our future.

Faith in incarnation is not belief in an abstraction, but an embrace of the fullness of reality – known and unknown – a reality that is God in Christ’s. The myth of our gospel narratives is a re-telling of this truth that reflects who Jesus is for us: the heart of all that is, the heart of all we truly are. Not one word goes forth from us, not one action, without having been touched by our God. Not one pain passes God’s notice or goes unfelt or unrecognized. Not one stumble, not one failing, not one joy or truly precious, cherished moment.

The birth of the Messiah is God’s first, great reminder to us and all Creation that we are loved. “Full stop,” as Desmond Tutu would say. Body and soul, spirit and flesh, creature, child, healthy and infirm, rich and poor, remembered and forgotten, saint and sinner, long gone and yet-to-be-born – a love that is perfected as it is whispered in the quietude of an infant sleeping and the eyes of wonder of a holy mother, the watchful gaze of a devoted father, the reverent observance of shepherds, animals, and angels – a love that is preparing to overturn everything we thought that was – even death itself – and recast the Cosmos and all our being yet again, for a God who has loved us into life, into being itself, and that we will never be alone.

Hands to the Plow

2010-06-27T21:00:00.000-07:00

Jesus, the Anglican Communion, and LGBT Pride Day

Sermon for Proper 8
RCL Lectionary, Year C

2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14 / Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20 / Galatians 5:1, 13-25 / Luke 9:51-62

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
June 27th, 2010

The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour
Mill Valley, California

Audio

Jesus, in good rabbinical fashion, offers us a series of shocking sayings today – sayings to shake us, his followers, out of our complacency. Sayings to awaken us to the bracing message of the Gospel. While he turns his face stubbornly towards Jerusalem ( much to everyone’s consternation and distress) he holds up a mirror to us, a mirror that reflects back to us our reluctance, our second-guessing, our hesitancy to live into the fullness of his message, of his Way.

We wrestle, as followers of Christ, with the same things Jesus’ would-be followers wrestled with. We have obligations – obligations to family, to tradition, to institution, to the pressing needs and concerns of our worldly lives. We spook easily at change, we blanch at difference, we resist the challenge those outside our doors pose to us, we seek safety in what we know and fear what we don’t. Jesus deliberately shakes up his hearers and us, shocks us out of our comfort and into a vulnerable, itinerate place – the place of ongoing journey, the fragility of raw humanity on a dusty road, even staring into the face of darkness, death, and dissolution. Only in that way will we “get,” both literally and figuratively, the Gospel. Only in that way, he reminds us, will we fully find God.

Some of you might have heard about our most recent Anglican dust-up. After a series of dueling Pentecost Letters, The Archbishop of Canterbury recently dismissed representatives of The Episcopal Church from Anglican Communion ecumenical councils as a consequence of our consecrating an openly lesbian Bishop in Los Angeles. This led in turn to an uncomfortable conversation between our Church's Executive Council and the Communion's Secretary General. Just where are we and who are we now as The Episcopal Church in the Anglican Communion? No one’s quite sure just yet. We’re well into uncharted territory, and clear answers are hard to come by.

As if that weren't enough to mull over on its own, our Presiding Bishop was visiting the cathedral in Southwark in the Church of England in recent weeks, when she was instructed by the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury to not only provide evidence of her ordination status (despite her numerous previous visits), but was told to refrain from wearing her mitre, her pointed bishop’s hat, during the liturgy, because the Church of England is in a very fragile state at the moment as they consider yet again the consecration of women bishops.

Coming at such a raw time for everybody, you can well imagine the result was an ugly all-to-public episode in trans-Atlantic ecclesiastical diplomacy that has become known as "mitregate.” It brought great embarrassment for many in the Church of England, and provoked appeals to 1776 on this side of the Atlantic! Our Presiding Bishop, to her credit, was quite courteous about the whole affair while in England, though upon her return she publicly noted the silliness of the reactivity over the episode. Then she moved forward with her service to the life and mission of a Christian people. But such is life in the Anglican Communion these days. While reactive leadership worries over who’s wearing a mitre and who isn’t, about who’s sitting on which council and who’s being consecrated where and how, while officials attempt to mop up a rude public relations mess and pundits and bloggers like me wax eloquent. . . while the general public roll their eyes over those silly Christians at it again, there are millions across the Communion in dire straits financially, experiencing maddening hunger and debilitating disease, and Creation groans while oil gushes in the Gulf.

It would be too easy to start scoring points against the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, for indulging in irrelevancy – especially in these days of the World Cup. Maybe this is some great ecclesiastical showdown on the world stage. Perhaps we could say The Episcopal Church has scored one goal for being dignified in the face of such rudeness, the Church of England for being so unspeakably insensitive, nil. The crowds are screaming from the stands and the feelings are running high. We could leave it there and call it game over, but that would be too easy. Truth be told, Rowan Williams is in an untenable position, and we are, too, and it’s only half-time.

The office of the Archbishop of Canterbury must oversee and we help fund a nineteenth- and twentieth-century institution, the Anglican Communion, that was built largely on the foundation of gentlemen’s agreements between English and North American bishops – yes, all men, all white – beginning at the height of the British Empire. With the freedom of colonial states in Africa and the explosion of evangelical Anglicanism and rising leadership in those countries; with monumental social, philosophical, and theological change in the West and a shift to more democratic principles of church governance here, the old way of Communion just doesn’t work anymore in a diverse Body.

Our Presiding Bishop puts it this way in a recent interview : we are like a great family in which the teenagers are at last growing up. We no longer, in old colonial fashion, turn to (papa?) Canterbury or gentlemen’s agreements to make it right. The institution, with all of its inherent inertia, its enthrallment with regulations, traditions, and old scores, hasn’t kept up with the times and now must leap somehow -- perhaps blindly or at least clumsily -- into the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. The Body of Christ is moving on to serve a rapidly changing world. How will we follow Jesus towards Jerusalem? Will be like Elisha daring to follow Elijah to the boundary of the Jordan? Will we pick up Elijah’s mantle when he departs? Will we dare ask for a double-share of the spirit of prophecy? These questions in the face of deeply conflicted times must keep Rowan Williams awake at night sometimes. I hope so. They would me. "The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head," after all.

But there is good news. For while bishops and officials quarrel over crumbling ecclesiastical edifices, the Gospel’s mission continues. I think of the House of Bishops in the Church of Tanzania, who hold that their church's communion with The Episcopal Church hangs by the barest thread because of our inter-provincial disagreements over human sexuality. Yet here we are at Church of Our Saviour, in partnership with Ibihwa parish on the ground in the Diocese of Central Tanganyika, supporting primary education for fifty children – many of whom have lost their parents to AIDS. The politicking of bishops matters little in such circumstances. Abstract theological disagreements over human sexuality quickly become irrelevant, when education means a future for a vulnerable life amongst people struggling with unimaginable tragedy and abject poverty.

Closer to home, I think of our youth returning from a mission trip to help with the Appalachia Service Project. I think of our ongoing ministry with the hungry in cooperation with Our Lady Mount Carmel – all theological and ecclesiastical differences aside. I think of the work of the wider Episcopal Church just in Marin County, from a developing food pantry in Contempo Marin to our partnership with numerous churches and organizations in Marin City to start the Hannah Freedom School, a literacy program for at-risk students in Marin City.

Jesus said, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” The Church that focuses on institutional preservation for its own sake is about the spiritually dead burying their own dead. When doing it the old way is the only reason for being, we lose sight of who we are called to be and we engage in a half-life focused on death. But when we re-set our gaze forward as a people on mission for the sake of the Gospel -- a people who are walking the way of the cross, who are putting our hand to the plow of the kingdom of God and not looking back, we regain our lives in Christ. The real Anglican Communion is not found in the formal structures of Lambeth Palace or in the tired strife between bishops and archbishops. The Anglican Communion where Jesus lives is where “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” It’s in the places where sleeves are rolled up for mission and justice prayerfully meets compassion, where suffering is relieved and the hungry are fed, where sacramental, embodied partnerships are giving life rather than fighting over abstract ideas and the inconsequential nature of steeples and mitres.

Then there’s Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, a retired cleric from the Anglican Church of Uganda. Bishop Senyonjo inherited the faith of nineteenth-century English missionaries, along with all the Victorian values they brought with them to the British colonies of Africa. But then came to his door a hidden class of people in Uganda, gay and lesbian, fearful for their lives, living in shame for their sexual orientation and in some instances their clandestine loves. Bishop Senyonjo and the church he served had taught that such as these belonged somewhere in the list of vices we hear today from Paul’s writing: outcasts and sinners surely, condemned by the Christian Gospel. But Bishop Senyonjo listened with compassion to their stories in the light of a loving God “from whom no secrets are hid.” And over time, he began to hear in his gay and lesbian sisters and brothers and in their relationships the fruits of the Spirit that Paul also identifies in the same passage: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These fruits of the Spirit stood in stark contrast to the encultured suspicions and hatreds of homosexuality in the greater community, ranging all the way up to proposed laws in Uganda – supported by the Church, I might add – to make homosexuality a capital offense. Bishop Senyonjo was converted in a profound way, and, setting his face towards Jerusalem after his beloved Christ, came out as a straight advocate for these hidden and oppressed voices in his Church and homeland. As a result, he and his wife found themselves cut off from his pension, receiving death threats, and severed from a Church to which he had devoted his life and love. Yet he persists, taking his message all around the Anglican Communion. Why? Maybe he has heard today’s Gospel, too, the call of Christ to move forward in God's love, even if it's toward into a crucified place.

For Jesus, the “Son of Man who has nowhere to lay his head,” does not travel alone, but travels with the outcasts and those proclaimed sinners by the wider society. He dines with the unclean and the ritually impure. He talks with women publicly and touches the leper. He hangs out with those proclaimed righteous and unrighteous alike. He faces down the pettiness of self-righteousness and the insularity of the powerful and the narrowness of the traditional. This is Jesus and his new family of the Kingdom on the move, walking towards a crucified place if need be. He is with our sisters and brothers walking this day in the fortieth annual Pride parade in San Francisco, a community of men and women recovering from society-inflicted shame, continuing to struggle for their rights to discern their unique path with God and to seek and celebrate the blessing of the Spirit in their most cherished relationships. Many in that parade have left the Church for obvious reasons. Some have remained by grace and bear with hope the institutionalized second-guessing much of Christianity continues to offer.

Theirs has inspired the struggle of a Church like The Episcopal Church that has recently opened our ears and hearts to their lives and stories. . . and made them our own. This is no longer about our ministry to LGBT people, but about our ministry with them. Like a family coming together out of the closet, this is no longer about "them," but about "us." We journey together towards Jerusalem and through a crucified place, thrown off ecumenical councils, punished by The Archbishop of Canterbury and our sister churches in many places and ways, on the receiving end of cries of heresy and bearing the umbrage of many at home and abroad. In two generations we have taken bold steps that leave us a minority – albeit a growing minority – in the greater Christian world, and we have yet further to go. For instance, it was only last summer that for the first time transgendered members of our Church were able to speak publicly about who they were and what they have experienced in the Church on the floor of our governing bodies. We have yet to settle the controversial questions of marriage and blessings in the context of our traditional liturgies. We are tangled in lawsuits as a few of our sisters and brothers attempt to depart the Body and try to take the property with them. An expensive courtroom battle becomes a painful, woeful recourse when the Family of God cannot live with difference. We quarrel just as the apostles did on the road to Jerusalem. But Jesus walks on – his face is set – leading us on just the same.

Jesus’ call to us today is one of mission above institution. In God’s kingdom our goodness of our institution is measured only as far as it serves the Gospel, only as far as it brings healing in grace, only as far as it is willing to set aside complacency for the rigors of relationship, only as much as it is willing to make tradition live for a new generation, to reinvent the old way of doing things for the needs of those who are with us in the holy present, and those who come after us in the hopeful tomorrow.

Are you challenged by this Gospel? I am. We all are together. But we are reminded in our hymn this day, that old hymn, with an ancient idea that stems from Jesus teaching now nearly twenty centuries old: the Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord. It is not a foundation made of cement or stone. Nor is it a foundation of portfolios, stocks, and savings accounts. Nor is it a foundation of old traditions bound up in pretty places or enshrined in canon law. It is a foundation of humanity and divinity made one in Christ – crucified by the world and raised again by God, and breathing ever new life among us in the Spirit.

Primus Contra Pares?

2010-06-18T10:42:00.000-07:00

It has been a very rude couple of weeks in Anglican Land, indications that there is a level of desperate grasping settling into some quarters: a quest for control rather than honest engagement.

What took the cake -- er, mitre -- was the pressure placed on our Presiding Bishop by the Archbishop of Canterbury's office to provide documentation of her ordination status and to refrain from wearing the symbols of her office while visiting Southwark Cathedral in the Church of England. This suddenly and inexplicably had become "policy" for our Primate following her numerous similar visits (and those of her predecessors) with no such requirements. True to form, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was courteous about the whole thing. But the discourtesy directed at her appears to many on both sides of the pond either a petty, misogynistic display of power or else a diplomatic blunder of the first order. Lots of coverage on this over at Episcopal Café.

Update: A solid five days after the media coverage began, an "official" explanation from Lambeth Palace is made public. What an embarrassment this has caused the ABC.

Then came Canon Kenneth Kearon's visit with the Executive Council of The Episcopal Church within the past 24 hours, where he was confronted with insightful, direct questions about all the recent efforts to marginalize The Episcopal Church in various bodies of the Anglican Communion. Lelanda Lee posted tweets on the discussion that ensued, while Lee Crawford offered to these questions the kind of embodied witness true understanding demands.

Update: Katie Sherrod, a member of Executive Council, offers a vivid, telling account of the conversation with Canon Kearon.

I don't know what kind of advice The Archbishop of Canterbury is receiving these days -- but if it's advice to generally irritate The Episcopal Church and make himself look petty, then it's working. The best that can be surmised is that his office is under considerable stress while the Church of England is trying yet again to settle the matter of women in the episcopate and where attempts to control the behavior of other provinces of the Anglican Communion is proving (rightly in my view) elusive. Oddly enough, I imagine most of the de facto members of the Church of England could hardly care less -- either about women bishops in their own Church or who gets consecrated in other churches of the Communion. While they live in the twenty-first century, the hierarchy of their established church seems stuck in retrograde -- perhaps moving back towards the nineteenth.

So much for Primus inter Pares (first among equals). This whole effort appears to style The Archbishop of Canterbury's office as some kind of impoverished magisterium. And, to paraphrase Bishop Marc Andrus, impoverished magisteriums (or Empires, or what have you) tend to attempt to control what they can, even if it is the inconsequential and ridiculous. Perhaps the new mode of the Archbishop of Canterbury in relationship with the Communion is "Primus contra Pares." It would better encapsulate the increasingly overt conflict between hierarchy and equality that we are now witnessing. And -- in no small irony -- it echoes the confrontation between divisive imperial social structures and the unifying Gospel to which Paul (of all the apostles!) points in this week's reading from Galatians.

The test for us is to remain dignified in the face of less-than-Christian behavior. Kudos to both our Presiding Bishop and our Executive Council on this score in the days of the World Cup:

TEC: 1

ABC: nil

Seeking Meaning

2010-06-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

Searching for God's deep meaning in the current Anglican tangle of difficult disinvitations and painful uncertainty, sometimes poetry is more healing than prose.

As always, Tobias Haller rises above, this time in a moving elegy that -- with an economy of words -- points us in the direction to which we are all called.

Go read and reflect.

Two Anglican Bishops on LGBT Rights

2010-06-09T22:18:00.000-07:00

Bishops Gene Robinson of New Hampshire and Christopher Senyonjo of Uganda offer up their pastoral perspectives on the ongoing life struggles of our LGBT sisters and brothers around the world. Both bring their own experience of being marginalized and threatened to their witness.

They remind us that theology is hollow if it is not worked out in the real, incarnate lives of God's people; that it is in humble, loving engagement with one another that our hearts, minds, and lives are transformed by the Gospel.

Engulfed in Oil

2010-06-02T23:17:00.001-07:00

How poignant our son's first-grade work becomes in these dark days of big oil:

O God, your unfailing providence sustains the world we live in and the life we live: Watch over those, both night and day, who work while others sleep, and grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other's toil; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Heremeneutics of Power

2010-06-02T15:02:00.000-07:00

Both Katharine Jefferts Schori, our Presiding Bishop, and Marc Andrus, the Bishop of California, read the Archbishop of Canterbury's Pentecost Letter through hermeneutics of power -- colonial, imperial, and ecclesiastical -- and find it much wanting when held up against the Gospel and the story of Pentecost.

I find their perspectives remarkably clarifying: the sort of grace we so need during a time of conflict.

The Presiding Bishop:

We live in great concern that colonial attitudes continue, particularly in attempts to impose a single understanding across widely varying contexts and cultures. We note that the cultural contexts in which The Episcopal Church’s decisions have generated the greatest objection and reaction are also often the same contexts where women are barred from full ordained leadership, including the Church of England.

As Episcopalians, we note the troubling push toward centralized authority exemplified in many of the statements of the recent Pentecost letter. Anglicanism as a body began in the repudiation of the control of the Bishop of Rome within an otherwise sovereign nation. Similar concerns over self-determination in the face of colonial control led the Scottish Episcopal Church to consecrate Samuel Seabury for The Episcopal Church in the nascent United States – and so began the Anglican Communion.

We have been repeatedly assured that the Anglican Covenant is not an instrument of control, yet we note that the fourth section seems to be just that to Anglicans in many parts of the Communion. So much so, that there are voices calling for stronger sanctions in that fourth section, as well as voices repudiating it as un-Anglican in nature. Unitary control does not characterize Anglicanism; rather, diversity in fellowship and communion does.

We are distressed at the apparent imposition of sanctions on some parts of the Communion. We note that these seem to be limited to those which “have formally, through their Synod or House of Bishops, adopted policies that breach any of the moratoria requested by the Instruments of Communion.” We are further distressed that such sanctions do not, apparently, apply to those parts of the Communion that continue to hold one view in public and exhibit other behaviors in private. Why is there no sanction on those who continue with a double standard? In our context bowing to anxiety by ignoring that sort of double-mindedness is usually termed a “failure of nerve.” Through many decades of wrestling with our own discomfort about recognizing the full humanity of persons who seem to differ from us, we continue to work at open and transparent communication as well as congruence between word and behavior. We openly admit our failure to achieve perfection!

The Bishop of California:

The [2008] Lambeth Conference was explicitly advertised as a non-legislative meeting; indeed we voted on nothing. However, lo and behold, through a non-transparent “consensus building” process, the bishops present (and so, in Archbishop Rowan’s thinking, the Communion) have affirmed the three moratoria put forward by the Windsor Report.

Here it is also important to note that the Windsor Report itself has been reified and given the status of a central Anglican document of faith and order, not by the test of time and use, but by the Archbishop and those who agree with him saying so.

When an Empire and its exponents can no longer exercise control by might, an option is to feint, double-talk, and manipulate. Such tactics have been in the fore with Archbishop Rowan since the confirmation of Gene Robinson as the Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. The deployment of the Windsor Report and the manipulation of the Lambeth Conference, as cited above, are prime examples. The archbishop’s Pentecost letter is the most recent example.

In the Pentecost letter, it looks like he is disciplining errant provinces of the Communion, while only a little concentration shows that the underlying goal is to assert his power to be the disciplinarian. Archbishop Rowan is intent on a covenant with punitive measures built in. The bishops of the Communion expressed their distaste for a punitive covenant, and so the archbishop has stepped up to be himself the judging authority he has been unable to build into a covenant.

Other examples in the Pentecost letter:

All three moratoria are supposedly to be attended to, but the packaging of the letter on the Anglican Communion website makes it clear that it is Mary Glasspool’s consecration that has galvanized the archbishop into action.
The archbishop says that primates of disciplined provinces are free to meet together. Surely these primates do not need the archbishop’s permission to meet together. This is another example of promoting the illusion of the archbishop’s power.
By taking offending provinces out of the conversation with ecumenical partners, the archbishop subtly implies that such conversation is dangerous and contaminating, exactly as was done with Bishop Robinson and LGBT voices in general at the Lambeth Conference.
That this is Archbishop Rowan’s Pentecost letter, given the layers that are not meant to draw us into more and more limpidity, but rather to obscure, I am saddened by such an offering from a theologian who has produced work of great profundity and luminosity in the past.

I think the message is pretty clear. As far as The Episcopal Church is concerned, the Windsor-moratoria-covenant game is up.

And not a moment too soon.

Does it Really Matter?

2010-05-31T20:13:00.001-07:00

Jim Naughton offers a clarifying piece over at Episcopal Cafe today:

Reflecting on Rowan Williams’ letter wasn’t a worthwhile use of my time; writing it was not a worthwhile use of his. The issues at stake have become so trivial—We are not debating right and wrong, we are debating whether there should be trifling penalties for giving offense to other members of the Communion.—that to engage them at all compromises our moral standing and diminishes our ability to speak credibly on issues of real importance.

This isn’t to say that we don’t have to make a decision about whether to accede to the archbishop’s proposal—and I suppose I think that we shouldn’t because it would only encourage him to make other such requests—just that whether we accede or not make very little difference to the world, to the Communion, to our ecumenical partners, to our church, or even to a Communion news junky like me.

Which is why I was of no use to the reporters I spoke to on Friday afternoon; because, God bless them, they had to write stories based on the mistaken notion that all of this stuff still matters, and increasingly, it does not. In attempting to ram through a covenant that marginalizes the laity and centralizes authority in fewer hands, Rowan Williams has unwittingly made it clear that the governance of the Communion is as nothing compared to the relationships within the Communion, and the relationships are beyond his control.

I can't imagine this being more clearly stated. The fact that The Archbishop of Canterbury has very limited authority to act is not a problem, but a blessing. The Communion, after all, is not the domain of prelates, as some would have it, but a fellowship of churches made up of millions of people in real, embodied relationships around common mission. And that common mission is not fundamentally about who's ordaining whom, but about who's fed, healed, and nurtured in the grace of God. This is what we have to offer a world in need, and what our leadership is called to nurture.

The rest is largely window dressing.

Measuring Consequences

2010-05-28T08:39:00.000-07:00

The Archbishop of Canterbury has just delivered his Pentecost letter to the communion, which commends careful reading. Simon Sarmiento over at Thinking Anglicans offers the appropriate links along with the summary press release.

There will be plenty of response, to be sure, from all sides, but here are a few thoughts I offer upon initial reflection:

This letter includes what many have been waiting for:the long promised "consequences" in response to the election and consecration of Bishop Mary Glasspool in the Diocese of Los Angeles. My critical mind notes that her name is the only one explicitly mentioned in the letter. That is a study in and of itself. It elevates her, however subtly or unconsciously, as a scapegoat, while bishops who have repeatedly violated jurisdictional boundaries (also in violation of the Windsor moratoria) remain personally unnamed. This scapegoating, this objectification, risks only feeding the trolls and says nothing about Bishop Mary Glasspool's gifts for this office or the discernment of the wider Episcopal Church in consenting to her consecration.
Another troubling aspect of the letter to me is that it continues to empower and validate the self-proclaimed Global South in their meetings separate from the rest of the Communion. I am somewhat puzzled how this may best be reconciled with Archbishop Williams' call for more Communion meetings that he appears to believe would be reconciling. The separate Global South gatherings are, at least from this vantage point, manifesting the balkanization that is widening the chasms, rather than bridging them. The Global South has been seeking validation for their actions through recognition from Canterbury for a long time. Now, they are getting more of what they want.
There will be a great deal of ink spilled on the proposed "disinvitation," but I suppose there are far worse consequences. Mark Harris over at Preludium, and Andrew Gerns over at Episcopal Cafe and related comments make a number of astute observations on this front. After all, what kind of Pentecost involves "disinvitation?"
My critiques notwithstanding, I think the letter bears out what one colleague said in conversation at General Convention last summer: The Windsor process, however flawed, is the only formal game in town. For the Archbishop of Canterbury's letter, this is clearly in evidence, as Windsor is the measure he employs to draw the consequences, however unenforceable they may be due to the limits of his office's power to govern individual provinces of the Communion.
Where I do see a great deal of hope is the letter's appeal to the processes of dialogue -- conversation, engagement at a personal and embodied level around our experiences shared and differing, rather than the more abstracted and more easily abusive dependence on legislating or reporting. Real conversation to reach some mutual understanding is about moving beyond the formal games and into something that may well be more incarnational, and indeed more profoundly Christian. The Indaba conversations at Lambeth 2008 helped begin an unfolding blessing of the Spirit that might have been better undertaken prior to any Windsor reporting or covenant generating -- perhaps long prior to the unsettled controversy over Lambeth 1998 I.10 and whether or not it really resolved, via a pseudo-legislative process, the "mind of the Communion" on human sexuality. But that, please forgive my indulgence, is what we like to call in America "Monday morning quarter backing" on my part. The Archbishop of Canterbury lives in the less-than-perfect world like the rest of us, and must make the best he can of the hand (or pass, if we continue with the American football metaphor) he has received.
I am grateful for his careful words and recognition of the limits of his authority to "fix" the situation. I am thankful for his acknowledgment of conscience at work in some of our more controversial decisions. I am glad for the recognition -- healthy, in my view -- that each Province must decide for themselves what they can conscientiously undertake. My optimistic side sees these as early fruits of the Indaba process, a sign that the Anglican Communion might be starting to turn a corner.
For our part in The Episcopal Church, I pray we will continue to be more just to the most vulnerable, and yes, chaste (there's that pesky word again!) -- that is honest and acting with integrity in our response.

Summing Up. . .

2010-05-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

. . . my week in the blogosphere. Ah, how the classics still speak to our day!

More on Chastity

2010-05-26T16:26:00.000-07:00

Having tired of attempting to engage with abuse from anonymous commentators over at Titus One Nine, I will dare here to draw in some background text to further support my reflection on a more expansive understanding of chastity.

One classical Christian text on chastity is from St. Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life, esp. III.12-III.13 (page numbers here are from my recently purchased copy of the 400th Anniversary Edition published by Eremitical Press).

While Francis’ treatment of chastity clearly begins with chastity’s recognizable technical definition of sexual purity, his opening on the subject in III.12 includes this lovely and undeniable springboard into wider meaning: “Chastity is called honesty, and the possession of it honor; it is also named integrity, and the opposite vice, corruption. In short, it has its special glory to be the fair and unspotted virtue of both soul and body ” (121-122).

Francis articulates the need to pursue chastity even while in the married state, even while enjoying sexual pleasure with one's spouse! The conclusion to be drawn is that there is much more to chastity, then, than merely the container (in this case, marriage) of sexual relations. Francis argues chastity demands a context of moderation and avoidance of abuse (123). This I interpret to mean abstaining from the realm of domination and control, which are arguably forms of abuse, however subtly they might be employed.

Late in the same section, he articulates the necessity of chastity for “all classes of people,” as chastity is inexorably linked with holiness and cleanliness of the heart (124) and he references three distinct parts of the New Testament to support his argument. To amplify Francis’ point further, I would add Jesus’ teaching that it is the heart from where all relational vice and violence come, as in Matthew 15:18-20. Chastity, Francis clearly argues, is not simply a matter of sexuality, but fundamentally and most importantly involves the human heart and the quality of all its relationships.

In III.13 (125-126) Francis takes this yet further by asserting that loss of chastity is possible even outside of sexual relations. A quote he attributes to Basil through John Cassian may very well be at the root of a teaching on chastity I was offered by a celibate monk: “I know not what belongs to a woman, yet I am not a virgin.” The implication is clear – it is possible for even the assiduously celibate to be unchaste. There is, simply put, much more to chastity than sex.

Again, I will concede there are disagreements in the wider church at present over what constitutes chaste sexuality. I might even dare to quibble with Francis on what defines chaste sexuality. But that is not at all to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water. By Francis’ standards, the underlying -- and more important -- virtue of chastity is found in its direction for all forms of human relating, and that is relating not through abuse (domination, control) but rather through the purity of love, integrity, peace, etc.

Ad Hominemed

2010-05-26T06:54:00.000-07:00

For me a bracing study this week in the blogosphere, though to be fair, I knew what I was getting into.

The third chapter of the Letter of James has proven a most excellent and humbling road map again, as it has for many across the ages:

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh.

Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

Babel and Big Oil

2010-05-25T18:24:00.000-07:00

From a Pentecost Sermon, and with prayers for those battling the slick these days in the Gulf of Mexico.

Audio

Lest we think God “fixed” us as a human family, neutered our pride in the primordial story of the Tower of Babel. . . the story continues to stand for a world still very much a part of our lives – one with which we are very much mixed up, whether we are still sorting out the mess brought upon us by the economic and financial crisis, or filling up at the gas pump as we all must while wrestling with our driving addiction to the black goo.

The Tower of Babel is as old as the human family is, and God, it seems, still comes down and shatters the tower, scattering us in our collective arrogance. The disaster in the Gulf, of course, is now all about finger-pointing between juggernauts like BP, the federal government, Transocean, and Haliburton. The fishermen scream for their livelihoods while shop owners, hotel managers, and environmentalists all together sing a chorus of pain even with the trauma of Katrina still all too fresh in their minds. We are like the people who built the Tower now scattered by our own different tongues and agendas while the black crude leaks into our hearts, threatening to poison us with our own arrogant tacit or explicit insistence on drilling deeper, faster, and more profitably. And who pays for the cost of the failed Tower of Babel? We blame big oil. We blame technological advancement. We blame lobbyists and inept politicians. The truth that virtually no media outlet will tell you is that it literally is no one’s fault. But, as we are in the process of discovering, the resulting mess, much like our economic crisis, now is most assuredly everyone’s responsibility.

But lest you think I’m just going to beat up on our shared secular arrogance, The Tower of Babel was very much part of the story of the institutional Church across the ages. Make no mistake. Think of the historic crusades and heretics burned at stakes, of popes, kings, and princes assuming totalitarian control over belief. We consider the dangers of declaring and judging what is orthodox – what is right teaching – and what is heterodox or wrong teaching – and then declaring our divine authority over the fates of other human beings. If that isn’t the arrogance and pride of Babel, I’m not sure what is.

We must consider the tired refrain these days in old ecclesiastical institutions like The Episcopal Church, where the old isn’t working so well anymore, our institution is struggling with too much expense, too little revenue, too little flexibility in an era of rapid change. We look at our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers struggling with yet another dreadful scandal built on a tower of power and control not unlike Babel’s. We look at our so-tired struggle with the wider Anglican Communion over sexuality – sexuality, you see, is far easier to fight over than the dreadful hungers and disease of a suffering world. We tried to build our own Tower of Babel in the heyday of Empire and in the post-war boom, and now some of us in the wider Church wring our hands and even go to battle over whether or not our Tower to God may be “going out of business.” But I say maybe the reality is that the God who abruptly ended the Babel building project is very much in our midst putting our institution as it was out of business. Why? Because, as Jesus taught us, in order to have new life, we must die to our old selves. In order to be in the business of the Gospel, we have to set aside our obsessions with the business of preserving an institution. That was a lesson of Easter, after all.

And the good news, the Gospel of Pentecost, is that God does not leave us babbling there at the foot of our crumbling edifices. For our Acts reading for Pentecost points us to a new primordial story that redeems the toppling of the Tower of Babel, and ushers in the new life of an ever new and renewed Church – not merely an institutional church mind you, but a new and ever renewed church born of water and the Spirit. The story of the Spirit coming amongst the disciples in Jerusalem centuries ago is about the birth of this new community – not one built on “too big to fail,” or “bigger, faster, better,” or even the hubris of demanding we all be or believe the same way, but built upon the diversity of the human family itself. Diversity is no longer a simple, harsh cure to our arrogance, but an avenue to the renewal of life, by the ways in which it undoes and remakes the old order – the way in which all is made new. And it is so crazy that we might be declared drunk on the wine of life, like the first apostles were. Yet it is only morning!

Is it not the Spirit’s unbounded wonder these days that we talk about diversifying our economy rather than relying on a handful of juggernauts to sustain us? Is it not the Spirit’s wisdom to suggest that the abundant energy around us demands a diversity of approaches rather than the singular dependence on drilling harder and deeper for more crude? And is it not the Spirit’s work that when communities like ours embrace our wide variety, our diversity of gifts, we grow, despite the declines of the larger institution?

And if you find that a little bit to “out there” to grasp, just look around you. Where today do you find community as wide-ranging as ours, where people young and old from every walk of life gather together in the generosity of common prayer and share from a common cup and a common plate. Where we break bread, splash water, and celebrate the new life we are offered by our unpredictable but ever-loving God. Where we are cured of our hubris not simply by the toppling of our Towers, but by the simple proclamation that our God in Christ lives. And how do we know that’s true? Not through simple deduction or force of saying it over and over. We know, because we see the many fruits of the Spirit in our lives, each in our own way: we feel the hope, we follow the thread of love. Even though it is often buried by all our concerns and worries, it breaks out of the tomb again. It blows among us, and alights upon us as a dove bringing promise of renewal. It is the challenge our diversity and difference brings into our midst that breaks through the stone of our hearts and causes us to offer our myriad diverse gifts and sing praise together in unison.

This Church, this Body in the Spirit, is the new community. It is the new creation after the ending of the Tower of Babel. We all know in our hearts the juggernauts that are “too big to fail” will indeed collapse now and in the future. We all know our empires will continue their cycle of rising and falling. We know that our dependence on oil will and must come to an end. We know that no institution, even a church institution, lasts forever. But the hope is what we celebrate this day – a promise not just for us, but the promise of the Gospel for all of the human family – for all of creation – in all of our glorious, abundant diversity of gifts. The gifts of ingenuity and imagination that the Spirit brings – gifts that will conquer the oil slicks and renew our common economic life. A Spirit that will restore health and justice to the planet and to our shared peace. A Spirit that will re-build our community for a new day, start our community afresh as it did to the scattered peoples gathered in Jerusalem that Pentecost almost 2,000 years ago. The Spirit that will wake us up to become the creatures of God we are called to be: each unique individually, but together, an image of our wonderful God who is creating new, diverse life for all eternity.

A Catalog of Names

2010-05-25T16:49:00.001-07:00

It's amazing how many names one can garner for oneself in parts of the Anglican blogosphere in a matter of hours. Here are a handful thrown indirectly and directly at me on just a single thread:

1. Humpty Dumpty

2. Revisionist

3. Gnostic

4. Heretic

5. Deconstructionist

I am sincerely glad I don't live in the sixteenth century. Otherwise, I might be on a cart right now headed for a rather unpleasant barbecue!

Or perhaps these days, such monikers should be worn as badges of honor.

On Chastity

2010-05-23T18:35:00.000-07:00

From a reflection just published at Episcopal Cafe:

Having spent an increasing amount of time in conversation with married couples in recent years, the most commonly destructive dynamic in any relationship I have found has to do with a failure of chastity. But I don't mean sex outside the marriage. By chastity in marriage I mean the challenge of setting aside the stubborn drive to control or change person we most cherish. When couples learn this, the effect in their relationship and family is simply astonishing. Anxiety and anger levels drop almost immediately. There is a renewed simultaneous sense of freedom and connection. Spouses allow their partners to grow. Parents allow their children to seek accountable maturity. Needs are articulated. Resentments are set aside. Rather than using or abusing the relationship to change others, the relationships by themselves become transformative. Everyone is changed.

Update: Kendall Harmon responded to this essay over at Titus One Nine.

Climbing a Masterwork

2010-05-13T22:41:00.000-07:00

Beethoven: Piano Sonata #21 in C, Op. 53 "Waldstein"

Richard Helmer

performed live at Church of Our Saviour
Mill Valley, California

May 8, 2010

I. Allegro con brio

II. Introduzione. Adagio &
III. Allegretto moderato - Prestissimo

The Waldstein has been my small mountain for a while now. And sometimes, you just have to climb those small mountains, even if you're not sure you're ready.

It was a blessing to play this for such a sympathetic and loving audience. There is more work to be done, but I feel grateful to have gotten this far with this immortal masterwork.

Herr Beethoven keeps me hard at it!

Photo from the performance by Terry Peck

Grotrian piano provided by JB Piano, San Rafael, California

The Matter of Growth

2010-05-10T21:53:00.000-07:00

I commented on this thread at Episcopal Cafe earlier today on the subject of church growth. Frankly, the subject is starting to wear quite thin on me, because it so often turns to matters of institutional preservation, which is not only deadly dull, but I am increasingly convinced deadly spiritually.

Standard congregational development schema I was taught to appreciate involve the transitions between various sizes of parishes -- family, pastoral, program, etc. The jargon goes on from there, and leads. . .well, where? Nowhere much in my view, and many of our leaders are left scratching their heads and wondering why. We often talk about "cultural change" in our congregations as though it is somehow divorced from and devoid of the language of the Gospel, which is not simply about system theories or whatever else is hot right now, but about the mysterious transformation of the human heart and transformation of the human family by God's loving grace and our active embrace of that through prayer and service to others.

I write this all with a straight face. I am a child, both literally and figuratively, of the institutional church. I am beholden to it at present both by vow and income, and I indeed wish to see it thrive and flourish. But it will most certainly not by navel gazing and hand-wringing, nor by romanticizing the blip of high mainline attendance in the 1950's, from which we are still declining. . .or perhaps a better word is recovering, as we move towards a more real place in a world where people are free to seek out spiritual community that nourishes their hearts, minds, and being.

I'm all for congregational development, building the church up and all that. Just ask anyone in the parish I serve. Our numbers right now are good and modestly improving, though, not because we've been good congregational developers and I've taught the theory well, but because we've identified the tangible spiritual needs in our community and have begun the hard work of addressing them. Because we've identified gifts in our community for leadership and ministry and empowered them. Because I've struggled to set aside the egotistical notion that I, as parish priest, can "save" the church and at times have managed to get the hell (literally and figuratively, again) out of the way.

At the end of the day, a lot of congregational development writing and talk is about ego -- feeding the ego by possessing "how to grow a church" through specialized knowledge or methodology. Or feeding the ego by romanticizing a supposedly greater past. Or feeding the ego by projecting current trends in a straight line and claiming we have control over the future, or at least some special knowledge about it. Or feeding the ego because "my family and I depend on this job." None serve us or the Christian Gospel at all well. We need to stop if we are to move forward. Idolatry is one way to talk about our egotistical obsessions. Idolatry is one way to talk about much of our chatter over church growth.

Growth is not the goal here. It is only the natural, God-given outcome of living faithfully into Christian mission. And growth has a great deal less to do with numbers than it does with the vibrancy of ministry and the freedom of the Spirit to move in community.

Here are my thoughts, for what they are worth:

No one wants to join a community wringing its hands and navel gazing over its own demise.

Nor does anyone want to simply become a number to prop up a flagging institution.

The real questions we need to be asking are those like these:

Are we endeavoring to be faithful to the Gospel and to our God?

Does our institution serve our mission of Christ Jesus to transform hearts and reflect God's work in the world? Or do we distort our mission to serve the institution? This is a simple (but not easy) matter of correctly ordering the carts and horses.

Are people finding spiritual nourishment, hope, and empowerment for ministry and service in their communities both within and beyond the walls of the Church?

If these criteria are being addressed with intention in people's real lives and grounded experience, growth of all kinds may very well follow. If they aren't, institutional death is a natural outcome.

We all fear death of institutions we love, of course. But at the end of the day, and indeed in God's gracious reign, we are not children of the institution.

We are God's children. We are people of the resurrection. And that's what truly matters, even as we face decline in many places.

Dear Johannes

2010-05-09T20:15:00.000-07:00

Johannes Brahms:
Sonata for Piano and Violin
in G Major, Op. 78

Tiana Wimmer, Violin

Richard Helmer, Piano

Recorded live at Church of Our Saviour
Mill Valley, California

May 8, 2010

I. Vivace ma non troppo

II. Adagio

III. Allegro molto moderato

Just Another Good Friday

2010-04-02T16:23:00.000-07:00

Delivered at Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, California

Sermon Audio Here

It is on the one hand just another Good Friday, and the world goes on its own way, mixed as it is with news good and bad. Employment reports this day give certain hope that the worm of the global economy is beginning to turn, though there still is a long and difficult road ahead for many. Haiti and Chile continue the long and difficult process of climbing from the rubble, stench, and death of natural disaster. War machines bring more violence to Gaza as Christian pilgrims gather for this holy day in Jerusalem, Jewish families continue to celebrate Passover, and faithful Muslims labor to rebuild civil society in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Our sisters and brothers in the Roman Catholic Church this Holy Week face the specter of a holy institution roiled by scandal, shaking the very foundations of ancient hierarchies just as it shakes the hearts of the faithful and their trust in their leadership. It’s tempting to fall into the old Protestant pastime of knocking Catholics for their failings. But we pray this day as we have always prayed on Good Friday, asking God to graciously behold this family – this family for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed – this family not over and against that family over there, but this one family of our common humanity, bound as we are together by the cross. So the pain of the Roman Catholic Church this day is our pain, too. Even if it is at one level only the garden variety sin of pride laid bare – the revelation in the cross that our ecclesiastical institutions can pain our beloved Christ just as much as any sharp nail or piercing spear.

Meanwhile, we know in our community and families that death is near for some of us. That pain is the greatest reality right now for others. That some of us struggle to keep our homes and to find work. That some of us are exhausted by the sheer weight of the realities that face us both here and now and beyond those doors when the Good Friday services conclude.

Would that Good Friday meant a final end to the cycle of corruption and scandal and violence and pain and death that continues in the human family, and for that matter the groaning of all Creation. But the present realities of the world and the strains and fractures and pain we each bring in our own way to this place this day only highlight that Christ’s crucifixion for us is fully present in this moment, in our midst, in our lives. . . in the depths of our very hearts.

For centuries, we have struggled to make sense of this visage, this cross, the self-offering of our beloved Savior to a most gruesome and tragic end: An end that is as visceral as it is spiritual, as anchored in the harsh realities of pain as it is elevated to the giddy heights of symbol, as centered in a passing moment as it is eternal.

But why do we need it? Why do we need a cross, a Messiah who dies, and a God who dares to look into the very face of our worst imaginings and most wicked machinations? The answers are as perhaps as numerous as we are:

I suppose if we believe in a wrathful God, angry with us for our sinfulness, we need a Messiah who pays the price for our reconciliation.

If we believe humanity has been enslaved by sin, evil, and death, we need a Messiah who offers the ransom for our souls to restore us to life.

If we find ourselves oppressed, we need a Messiah who liberates us; if we are ourselves the oppressor, we need a Messiah who confronts us, who bodily stands between us and our victims in God’s name.

If we believe in a loving God wooing us back from our deep tendency towards self-serving grasping and wanton destruction, we need a Messiah who stretches out his arms on the hard wood of our cold hearts, breaking them open and drawing us back to God’s life-giving heart.

If we believe in a God wanting to restore the miracle of Creation, even to draw it into greater glory, we need a Messiah who gathers the sap and DNA of our lives, who joins with the dance of consciousness, earth, and stardust as we all do each day and every day, who knows the scorching power of the noonday sun and the piercing reality of metal, and the saltiness of our blood.

Good Friday and the breadth of our Christian tradition contains all these perspectives and more: the mystery of the cross is not so much in our trying to understand Christ’s passion; but that through it, God understands ours: our suffering, our mendacity in our conflicted loyalties, our divided hearts that make us at once a people who shout “Hosanna!” and a mob that yells, “Crucify him!” Who knows our pain, our life, and our death. Who knows our oppression and our freedom. Who knows our loves and our hatreds.

It is in the cross of Jesus that the suffering of humanity, and even the pain of all creation, is fully embraced by our Creator, is embodied in the divinity made one with fragile flesh, in the precious grace of a life freely offered so that all might live.

As contemporary theologian Christopher Evans puts it: “On the cross Jesus completes his embrace of the human condition and of fleshly existence all the ways down, for all sorts and conditions, once for all in every time and place.”

The cross stands forever. Maybe not because God needs it so much as we do. It stands in the face of our scandals and conflicts, in the midst of our violence from our accidental to our most willful, in our sufferings and in our unmet needs. It stands in the Church that has failed us countless times, in our relationships where we have learned the bitterness of betrayal, in our despairing laziness and unwillingness to commit; in our goal-oriented, task-driven lives where we have learned that we are not really in control. It stands as witness to our impending death and the decay that always dogs us.

And it says to us that God knows all this, too. And not only understands it, but embraces it, becomes one with it, gives up every conceivable purity to be God amidst the violence in Gaza, the God at the Seder, the God rebuilding the impossibly broken, the God sorrowing over scandal as victim and struggling leader, the God who is unemployed and underemployed, the God who is homeless, the God who struggles to move the best of each of us forward, the God who labors to restrain and even transform the worst in us. Our God, this God, this God of the cross, who ate and sang, who prayed and talked, who bleeds and dies as one of us, so that even our greatest tragedies and our worst imaginings are not beyond the reach of grace, of love, and the hope of renewal.

Heads in the Sand

2010-03-23T15:24:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent
RCL Lectionary, Year C

March 21st, 2010
The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour
Mill Valley, California

by The Rev. Richard E. Helmer

Audio here

The author of John really hangs the offense at Mary’s lavishly over-the-top action today around Judas’ neck – seeming to overload the argument with the accusation that Judas was a thief, stealing out of disciples’ common purse. Maybe the author pushes the case against Judas hard because there’s something uncomfortably familiar about Judas’ words and perspective, something uncomfortably like a mirror in his reaction to Mary’s outrageously expensive act. 300 denarii, the value of that pound of nard, was worth one year’s wages for a regular worker of the time, after all. It would be akin these days to buying Jesus a six-figure high-end sports car or setting him a lavish catered dinner at the Outdoor Art Club. Would we be offended if such an act were planned? Of course we would be, just like Judas.

Judas’ words reflect our own judgments about the way things should be in the world, and, indeed, the church. How we expect things ought to be and with some good reason – our own thievery aside. We have to wonder regularly if our operating budget leans too heavily on maintaining an institution, from staff salaries to upkeep, and whether or not we allocate enough to serve the poor. We have to wonder from time to time if lavish liturgy – the rough equivalent of our regularly breaking an expensive jar of ointment over Jesus’ feet to honor his work among us – is a scandal when there are people who appear regularly at Camino Alto and East Blithedale begging for a few dollars just to eat their next meal.

The question before us this day is the question that hits Judas straight between the eyes. Is this Jesus who accepts such a lavish gift the Messiah we expect? Maybe not. Judas’ expectations are so poorly met by Jesus’ actions that Judas takes great offense – so great an offense that he is drawn headlong into acts of betrayal infamous in the Christian tradition. But who felt betrayed first? Honestly, I think Judas did.

As we all do when our God in Christ fails to meet our expectations;

When our prayers don’t get answered the way we want them;

When Jesus fails to show up the way we think we need him;

When our best and most loving plans wander into chaos or down dead-end alleys;

When our expectations of even those we most dearly love are uprooted by the harsh realities of disappointment, failure, and betrayal.

It reminds me of learning recently that one definition of expectation is “planned resentment!” I carry that teaching around with me every day, and quote it probably more often than necessary. When disappointment and betrayal come knocking, which they do, this teaching is a touchstone that reminds me I am not in charge, and I most certainly am not God.

As a Christian community, we are about to run headlong into the climax of Lent. With Holy Week around the corner, our expectations about what should be are about to meet what will be in the cross. All the disciples will follow after Judas in their own way. Peter will deny Jesus three times. Others will simply run silently and hide out of fear as Jesus, along with every expectation of what a Messiah should be, is hung up to die.

It is Mary of Bethany, oddly enough, who is remembered among the ranks of the faithful, faithful as she is to this fragile savior who offered her wisdom in the midst of a capricious and unpredictable life, who raised her brother from death when all hope was gone. This Mary who threw all caution to the winds and gave her most expensive gift to this man who is about to die. This Mary who would be laughed off Wall Street, Main Street, and perhaps even out of our pews at times for her lack of proportioned reasoning or her impoverished management of risk; Who scandalizes every conceivable expectation that we might have about the way rational followers of Jesus are supposed to behave.

The poetry of the prophet Isaiah this morning talks about hyenas and ostriches – strange images of the deserts of our souls where laughing cynicism can rule and we are tempted to stick our heads in the sand. For it is our mysterious and often inscrutable God who says, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” And that new thing will defy every possible expectation that we have. Our lack of perception is in part about unmet expectations, unanticipated turns in the road of life, the unplanned contingencies of our fragile humanity.

Oddly enough, this is what Mary blesses with her scandalously lavish act in today’s Gospel. It is what we bless each Sunday as we gather to break open the fragrant vessels of our expensive hearts over the Lord’s feet. . . As we honor his saving grace, though we can scarcely understand it except in hindsight, by only looking backwards over the experiences of our meandering, unpredictable lives.

Jesus asks his most intimate disciples and us, his followers, to set aside our narrow expectations about the way we think things should be, and instead embrace the abundance of God’s grace given to us in the way of the cross. To hold our concepts of order lightly while we embrace the ironies of a God who gives up life so that all may have it; Who defeats death by dying; Who overturns evil by capitulating to it; Who upends poverty by scandalizing the prosperous; Who subverts oppression by humbly offering self as servant, as slave; Who brings new life not to the carefully planned but to where there is sacrifice and offering, transformation where ordinary water is sprinkled, wholeness where hearts are broken like bread, a new family where a cup is shared amongst strangers.

It is near the end of the Lent. Time to take our heads out of the desert sands of our expectations and perceive that our God of life is indeed about to do a new thing in our midst.

Ungracious Straining

2010-03-19T07:44:00.000-07:00

The Episcopal Church's consent to Mary Glasspool's election as bishop suffragen in Los Angeles is raising the expected eyebrows while celebration is coming from many quarters. I celebrate while remembering the sober caution against the tendency of both press and controversy to distort Canon Glasspool into the narrow headline box of "openly lesbian bishop." She is rather an enormously qualified and gifted bishop-elect, a gift to the church, and yes indeed presents a gracious challenge to the narrow phobias, brinksmanship, and bigotries that continue to roil the Anglican Communion.

In truth, the fuss now is not about Mary Glasspool. It's about us as a yet unperfected Body struggling with our own shadows. Thankfully, Christ is with us in the struggle.

Lambeth Palace, meanwhile, has issued a most patronizing statement in response to the consent:

It is regrettable that the appeals from Anglican Communion bodies for continuing gracious restraint have not been heeded. Following the Los Angeles election in December the archbishop made clear that the outcome of the consent process would have important implications for the communion. The Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion reiterated these concerns in its December resolution which called for the existing moratoria to be upheld. Further consultation will now take place about the implications and consequences of this decision.

But is this "gracious restraint" from Lambeth Palace? More like "ungracious straining."

With the sieves and distortions that often come with the quest for eccesiasiastical control, I am reminded of Jesus' admonition to us all, Scribes and Pharisees that we can so often be:

For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practised without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel! - Matthew 23:23-24
Mark Harris, Tobias Haller, and Father Jake all offer, as always, great insight.

A Bit 'O Chopin

2010-03-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

Amazing what can be done these days simply with an iPhone and a piano!

I recorded this Chopin prelude this morning just as a technical check-in. The piano's an old Packard in our parish choir room literally on its last legs (one leg is to be replaced later this week) but I enjoy giving it a workout pretty regularly. For me, mostly Beethoven and Brahms these days, while Chopin keeps the chops progressing.

Op. 28 No. 3 has always associated itself in my mind with waves at the seashore. May date back to its use in the soundtrack for a seaside scene in a BBC dramatization of Persuasion I watched years ago. At any rate, it's been part of my warm-up for a long time.

Enjoy!

A Pastoral Paradox

2010-03-12T20:58:00.001-08:00

What kind of a watchman am I?
Far from the heights to which I aspire,
I am constrained by my weakness.

And yet — the one who created me
and redeemed me and all humanity
can give me, even in my unworthiness,
some grace to glimpse the whole of life,
and the skill and ability to speak of what I see.

So it is for the love of God
that I do not spare myself in preaching.

- Gregory the Great
(remembered in the Episcopal Church on March 12)

icon written by Br. Tobias Haller, BSG

A Thought for Deep Lent

2010-03-11T21:23:00.000-08:00

The unfolding saga in the Diocese of South Carolina, one of the latest flash points of controversy in the Episcopal Church, generated a lot of comment at Episcopal Cafe this day in an article posted by Andrew Gerns. Proposed resolutions coming up at their specially postponed diocesan convention ring simultaneously of both the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries -- the former with its dueling claims of sovereignty and power, the latter smacking of secessionist fervor that helped lead to the American Civil War. The icing may be longstanding disputes within The Episcopal Church over the return of Catholic piety and liturgical practices. All are age-old battles that don't seem to fully die with time -- elephants in our shared living rooms that, if not cast under the light of self-awareness, tend to run the show when tensions rise.

In the midst of such complex historical and cultural roots fueling an ongoing fit of crisis, there's a lot of traffic and numerous accusations crossing the Mason-Dixon line from both sides these days. Amidst all the suspicions and unwillingness to wade deep into the messy business of relationships--which is what obedience is really all about, including our much vaunted doctrine and discipline as a Church--I am left to wonder how easily we all like to wear our grievances like a cloak, even when the Prince of Peace calls us to set aside such burdens for the sake of the Gospel.

So which, then, is a better Lenten discipline:

Lines in the sand or setting aside grievances in the quest of deeper relationship?

First Miracles

2010-01-18T11:33:00.001-08:00

Sermon for the Second Sunday after The Epiphany
RCL Lectionary, Year C
Isaiah 62:1-5 / Psalm 36:5-10 / 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 / John 2:1-11

January 17th, 2010
The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour
Mill Valley, California

Audio available here.

There is so much material to work with in today’s readings, it’s hard to know where to begin. We first might be tempted to talk about marriage – the theme of our Hebrew Scriptures lesson and the setting for Jesus’ first miracle. We might wonder if there is anything here to inform what is unfolding these days on the other side of the Golden Gate, as one of the most important religious, civil rights, and institutional debates of our time begins in federal court. Our tradition holds up the wedding in Cana in our marriage liturgy as a rare example of Jesus’ blessing on matrimony. But it is odd that we hold it up in this way. The story doesn’t have Jesus active at all in the marriage proper, and instead he is much more concerned about the party afterwards. Rather than counseling the bride and groom, he seems much more preoccupied with jars for water standing empty. Perhaps our seeming preoccupation with marriage and gender are not so much Christ’s concerns as our own.

No, there is something much deeper going on in today’s readings than an argument about marriage, who gets to wed, and who doesn’t. And that deeper something speaks to us more when we consider the shadow over us all this week. . . as horrific images and cries come from our sisters and brothers in Haiti following one of the worst natural disasters in recent years. The water of today’s gospel is much less about a wedding and much more about the thirst of those who have had no water for days; for the hunger for comfort in lives that are broken and lost; for the desperate men, women, and children seeking loved ones amongst the rubble of their homes.

At the heart of the devastation in Haiti is the age-old question of theodicy. . . the broad question of why God apparently allows, or even as some people sometimes claim, causes bad things to happen – even horrific things. It was a question that Isaiah is in the middle of addressing in today’s prophetic words composed for a people in exile – a people. . .God’s people even. . . who seem to have lost everything that made them God’s people: their homeland, their roots, their temple, the very heart of their heritage. It is also a question John’s early Christian community wrestled with as they were turned out of the synagogues and their roots and heritage in Judaism were profoundly questioned. It is a question these days on the streets of Port au Prince amidst incalculable and unspeakable thirst, hunger, and pain. What is left, and where is God? It is the first question of faith, a question we all hold as we gather together in God’s name; a hard question that must be lived most of all by those of us who claim a loving and gracious God.

We could resort to the widely declaimed Pat Robertson solution this week, which is to simply blame the people of Haiti for bringing God’s wrath on themselves for pagan ways past and present. It’s an argument beyond the odious, and – for my money – I frankly have far less use for a wrathful God than a negligent one. But there are subtle ways we still take up Robertson’s apparent theme, like the much more secular articles I read yesterday pointing to the shoddy construction and widespread corruption in Port-au-Prince as root causes for the disaster. These were cited as reasons that an earthquake roughly equivalent in power to the Loma Prieta quake can take tens of thousands of lives in Haiti rather than a few dozen as it did over twenty years ago in the Bay Area. Then there is the natural tendency to blame as I heard two people doing as they discussed the situation in Mill Valley’s downtown yesterday. . . to blame simply out of our frustration that decades of international aid and political support have not born the fruit we expect. But then, blame -- however justified -- is a favorite American pastime these days, and it does nothing to relieve the suffering, restore the lives, or salve the broken hearts of our sisters and brothers who face a nightmare at which most of us can only recoil. Blame is, quite frankly, an easy way out in the face of questions of theodicy, for it can let us off the hook for our shared responsibility, and it quickly forgets that our lives are profoundly interconnected. Blame is a manifestation of judgment. And as Jesus reminds us elsewhere in the Gospel, when we judge, we only judge ourselves. And Jesus has one command for us when it comes to that kind of judgment, whether we are widely known televangelists or lesser-known priests and parishioners at Church of Our Saviour: Don’t indulge in it.

Perhaps a better answer to this question of theodicy is tucked away in today’s gospel, and whispered in Isaiah and held close to Paul’s heart in his Letter to the Corinthians: and that answer is that we have a God who lives not on high, but right in the middle of our humanity. We don’t get a God who, like Superman, shields the faithful from our vulnerability or swoops in to fly us out of harm’s way. Nor do we get a God who deliberately shakes the earth and wields indiscriminate death like the angry spirits of old. Instead, we get our God in Christ, who embraces our suffering, who brings water to the thirsty and food to the hungry and calls us to do likewise; who blazes trails through our devastations to bring us the balm of compassion, who weeps with us on the streets of death and shows up even at our feasts when the wine has run out. A God far less interested in severing us from our heritage than rebuilding it. A God who weds us in baptism. A God who defangs death by rising again after accompanying us through the darkest valleys. A God who raises us up when we have fallen beneath the rubble of this life. A God who draws hope out of suffering and joy out of sorrow. A God who confronts every evil from without and within and transforms its consequences into grace.

When Jesus shows up at the wedding in Cana in Galilee, and performs his first miracle in the Gospel of John, he is not merely proving himself to his new disciples or saving the party. . .or conserving the institution of marriage for that matter, whether of the first century kind or the twenty-first century kind. Jesus, the living Word of God, instead is speaking through action to the very heart of who we are as a Christian community and as a human family. He is redefining not only marriage, but every other human relationship and institution, from our most intimate to those that are economic, political, national, and global.

The water, poured into the jars of purification, are for John’s gospel community and for us the water of baptism, which Jesus transforms into wine, the great Eucharistic symbol of his blood – and not just his blood, but our new blood, the blood of the new family of God, a blood that makes us one with one another and with our sisters and brothers suffering this day in Haiti and around the world. The new wine that is saved for last, the blood that ushers in new life in the face of all our suffering and death. The blood that binds us to one another in grace, and casts aside the divisions of judgment and blame and replaces them with the bonds of a shared heritage of justice, hope, and love.

Today, as we baptize Liberty Carter, we welcome her into this new family, this new family where Jesus, in our shared story this day, demonstrates to us that water indeed runs thicker than blood; that baptism resides at the very center of who he is and who we are now, and who we are in the process of becoming. Liberty is not guaranteed any more than the rest of us a life without challenge or suffering, but she will be endowed with the spiritual gifts that will see her through the hardest days: gifts of the baptismal life like those Paul discusses with the Corinthians today. . . uttered wisdom, knowledge, prophecy, healing, fidelity, discernment, and tongues that will permit Liberty to articulate the deep language of her heart and interpret the heart speech of others. The gifts of the Spirit that will fill her soul when the vulnerabilities of this life threaten to empty it, that will remind her of the abiding presence of Christ when all else fails. The gifts of the Spirit that give her a claim on us, her new family, every bit as much as we have a claim on her in God’s name. The gifts of the Spirit that will call her to compassion – to be Christ’s eyes and hands in the face of suffering. The gifts of the Spirit that will lead her to carry her cross and follow after the Holy One. The gifts of the Spirit that will allow her the freedom to look at death without succumbing to fear, and rise again with God in Christ.

This is the promise of our baptism, the promise of the water made into wine, the new blood of God’s new family, the first miracle of our journey with God in Christ Jesus, reflected in that first miracle at the wedding in Cana. And it’s first miracles like this one that we trust are happening now amidst the devastation of Haiti, as boots hit the ground and the aid arrives, as compassion unleashes not distant condemnation, but present, struggling generosity; as the Haitian people themselves usher in first miracles in which the thirsty taste the water of new life and begin to rise from the rubble to reclaim and rebuild their God-given heritage. For we know this story as the story of the Gospel, and we live it in Christ’s love no matter where we are. It is the story of our own transformation in the Word of the Living God, and it begins with that first miracle of baptism, and stretches all the way to the final miracle – the miracle of resurrection for the new family of God.

Where was God in the Earthquake?

2010-01-14T10:40:00.000-08:00

by Craig David Uffman

I write with heavy heart, my mind assaulted by the images of devastation wrought by the cataclysmic earthquake that struck Haiti yesterday.

What are we to say to one another? What are we to say to our children whom we have pledged to teach to walk in the ways of the Lord? For, at such times, from the very depths of caring souls arises a groan, too deep for words, and, eventually, a haunting question: where was God in the earthquake?

There are those who speak at such times of the omnipotence of God. Some will see this and all such natural disasters as evidence against the God in whom we trust. They will portray the earthquake as 'Exhibit A' in their case against our claims of a good and loving God.

Others will feel it necessary to defend the righteousness of God. Well-meaning Christians will rise to declare this disaster to be God's majestic will, a will wholly impenetrable to us, and they will cite our story of Job to warn us against efforts to comprehend it. And, sadly, other Christians also will rise to declare this disaster to be God's will, but, forgetting Job and distorting our story tragically, they will tell us precisely which group among us brought about the earthquake as punishment for their unforgivable sins.

Each of these do us a service, for they force us to give an account of our faith in God and to remember carefully the truths about God we actually claim. For the same question that moves these groups haunts us, too, as we see the tears of anguished, hungry, and orphaned girls and boys reaching their hands out to us: where was God in the earthquake?

Theologian David Bentley Hart offers the best answer I know in his book The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami. He wrote it upon reflecting on the great tsunami that struck Asia in 2004. Hart reminds us that "we are to be guided by the full character of what is revealed of God in Christ. For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God."

As we participate vicariously in the tormented tears of young girls, lost and alone in the Haitian darkness, as our hearts pour out tears for the thousands of sons and daughters and mothers and fathers who have died so suddenly and shockingly,and as we turn to our task of being the loving and living hands of Christ in response to this tragedy, let us never forget the urgent truth about God that it is our vocation to proclaim: God does not will our sickness or our death; God does not will that evil be done; God has conquered evil and death through the Cross. This is the meaning of the empty tomb. This is our Easter faith. . .

A Thought about Covenants

2009-12-31T20:05:00.001-08:00

Covenants that must be explained by what they are not are in deeply troubled waters - baptismal and otherwise.

(cf. The Archbishop of Canterbury defends the Anglican Covenant)

Christmas for the (Un)Closeted Christian

2009-12-25T00:03:00.000-08:00

Sermon for Christmas

Isaiah 9:2-7 / Titus 2:11-14 / Luke 2:1-20 / Psalm 96

The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour
Mill Valley, California

Audio Here

I was sitting this morning with a friend, a Rabbi, as our sons played together on the plaza in downtown. It was a brief, last-minute Advent break for me – the last breath before the plunge into all the Christmas activities of this year. He asked me if I had my Christmas sermon all prepared, and I had to tell him no! I was still waiting for the right story, the right theme to emerge to go with the outline that was starting to form in my heart and head. I recounted with a nervous chuckle that I seem to be writing and preaching best these days under pressure of deadlines. Somehow, it comes together just in time.

That said, it’s a little unnerving, to say the least, on Christmas Eve morning to not have the Christmas sermon writ yet. But that in itself, for my walk at least, is part of the expectation of Christmas – the “not ready yet” nature of the season, the table not quite set, the gifts not all quite wrapped, the house not quite prepared. But now we are here – Christmas is upon us – and in the words of an Anglican prayer: “It is night after a long day. What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done; let it be.” (A New Zealand Prayer Book, pg. 184).

And my sermon is here, because sure enough, early this afternoon, I stumbled by grace across a reflection that appeared on Salon.com. It was a reflection that captured the essence of Christmas for me this year, and for where we are in our common life – a startlingly honest and insightful article by Ada Calhoun (H/T to Episcopal Café), who writes:

It was Sunday morning in my scruffy Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood, and I was wearing a dress. Walking to the subway, I ran into a friend heading home from yoga class. She wore sweats and carried her mat over her shoulder. "Where are you going so early all dressed up?" she asked, chuckling. "To church?" We shared a laugh at the absurdity of a liberal New Yorker heading off to worship.
The real joke? I totally was.
Inside the church, it's cool and quiet. I read the Collect of the day in the Book of Common Prayer, which urges us: "While we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure." My recent layoff no longer seems like the end of the world. I take Communion and exchange the peace and listen to the sermon. As I'm walking back up the aisle, I feel reoriented and calmer, the indignities of the week shift into perspective.
These moments are not only sacred; they are secret.
Outside, on the steps of the downtown Manhattan church, I think I see someone familiar coming down the sidewalk, and I bolt in the other direction.

Why am I so paranoid? I'm not cheating on my husband, committing crimes or doing drugs.

But those are battles my cosmopolitan, progressive friends would understand. Many of them had to come out -- as gay, as alcoholics, as artists in places where art was not valued. To them, my situation is far more sinister: I am the bane of their youth, the boogeyman of their politics, the very thing they left their small towns to escape. I am a Christian.
It’s a passage that could have been written for us in the Bay Area, couldn’t it? And it sat for me in stark contrast to another reflection I read this morning google-listed as “The Meaning of Christmas,” a harsh one that seemed to be out of the fundamentalist play book about Jesus coming into the world because God was still angry with us – or at least holding us at his holy arm’s length – upset over what happened in the Garden of Eden or the contemporary findings of science, or what have you. . . That, in essence, the message of Christmas had something more to do with what we are against than what we are for. This was a message that to me that more readily captures the spirit of our age, but far less the true spirit or meaning of Christmas.

Ada Calhoun’s piece about being a secret Christian spoke to me and Christmas so much more deeply not simply because she attends an Episcopal Church, but because she talks in a profound sense to the central event of this night – this child born in our hearts and in our midst – almost in secret and off the beaten path – who even before he can speak transforms the very fabric of our lives. This child and his mother holding him, pondering all these things in her heart. . .

And how embarrassing it is – especially in a post-Christendom era like the one we live in; in a diverse and secular era where being Christian is becoming increasingly unusual and slightly odd – that we – conservative, liberal, and in the middle alike – gather together this evening and call this fragile, gurgling child “God,” revere him, give him every accolade we can imagine. And then we join the illiterate shepherds and the down-and-out to worship him, unnoticed, at first, by the powers and principalities of this or any age.

And how we as Christians walk with this faith every moment of every day somewhere at work in our lives, sometimes secretly shielding it from the harsh and cynical gaze of others, sometimes embarrassed by the militant clothing it receives from some of our sisters and brothers. We want to be courageous as a faithful people. Indeed, frequently, we ought to be. But our courage is not wrought on believing we are right and others are wrong. Nor is it wrought on a score-card of “saved” souls. It is instead born in this marginal way, out of the recognition that life is extraordinarily vulnerable, and that our God has not come to us with vengeance or anger or a cosmic balance sheet, but has instead simply and somewhat secretly come among us, as one of us. That our redemption belongs to this child who only knows right now that he is hungry, who needs the warmth and attention of his mother to survive, who needs to be swaddled and suckled and rocked gently by those who love him.

Christmas, a story of stories, is at once the story of the fragility of grace in our lives. Quite possibly it’s a sign of our times to consider the tender grace when there has been so much upheaval for so long around us – personal, financial, vocational. I’ve had people in my office at least once a week for several weeks now who have been wrestling with unemployment for many months – some over a year. People struggling to make ends meet, people in tears struggling with where God might be calling them next – when the most obvious and experiential answer feels like “nowhere.” Grace for them is fragile, maybe a bit embarrassing, like the Christ-Child, tender in the raw places of the soul worn down by the ups and downs of a capricious world.

Somehow, we expect a Super-God to swoop down and save us from the vagaries of history, the places we find ourselves – those places where we never intended to end up. But most of us learn sooner or later to stop pointing fingers and accept that we are often ending up in places in our lives – both difficult and easy, tough and wonderful – through no great fault of our own. Sooner or later our pretense at control over our lives gives way to a more realistic assessment that we are dependent and interdependent on countless others who came before us and who are around us. Most of our lives, quite frankly, are not within our control. The suffering and joys that we receive are rarely asked for, even more rarely bought or purchased. And so we struggle as our spiritual ancestors have done for generations with a desire for a God to rescue us, a powerful divinity to shore us up and hem us in. Or we have turned to our own devices and built economic or military juggernauts. But they cannot save us, as even they succumb to the slow erosion of time.

This night, we receive neither control over our own destinies, nor a God who guarantees the future. Instead, our redemption begins with this child, this fragile grace. The Christ-child who reminds me of the tender power of a smile or a gentle touch, the delicate beauty as we sing in one hymn this time of year of a rose, or a human heart revealed in a moment of honest humility. Of Mary pondering all these things deep in the secret places of her heart. These are the images of our God at this time. Not what we thought we needed. Not what the world tells us our God should be. And certainly not what we wanted at a vulnerable time! But this is the God we receive.

And this is a better God than we might have asked for or imagined. This is a God who understands intimately our plight and misery, our vulnerability and sorrows, the fragility of our happiness and the sweetness of our joy. Not an aloof God, nor a God in armor – spiritual or otherwise – but a God open and humble as we truly are when we remember where we came from and where we are going. When we pause from our collective hubris and realize the tender, fleeting grace that we call life. There is simply only one way to redeem this embarrassingly fleeting life for the Creator of all that is, and that is to enter it fully and take on every aspect of our humanity. To bundle up all our sorrows and joys, our disappointments and victories; to bundle everything that is us up in swaddling clothes and rock it gently in a primordial love that is eternal.

And that is good news as the shepherds gather and the angels sing, even here on the seeming margins of all that is powerful and potent in a post-Christendom world – just as it was in a little Judean village at the edge of an empire all those years ago. A bit embarrassing, perhaps, but nonetheless moving. Because now we know we are not alone. Now we know it is not simply that our redemption has drawn near, but our God has entered our lives, body and soul. And we are touched by that divine grace and love. . .and we will never be the same.

Picking Up Sticks

2009-11-08T18:34:00.001-08:00

Sermon for the Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost  Proper 27 
RCL Lectionary, Year B
 1 Kings 17:8-16 / Psalm 146 / Hebrews 9:24-28 / Mark 12:38-44

November 8, 2009 

The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour
 Mill Valley, California

Picking up Sticks and Offerings
by The Rev. Richard E. Helmer

Audio available here.

As we prepare to wrap up our 2010 stewardship pledge campaign at Church of Our Saviour, it is tempting to take a well-trod road with today’s readings and talk about the widow’s mite. . .for me to offer some kind of final exhortation to each of you to aspire to her generosity as she put everything she had into the Temple treasury. It’s tempting, because it would avoid the more humbling and, in some ways more frightening implications of today’s gospel.

Today’s gospel is humbling because all Jesus’ harsh words about the Scribes give me great pause. Truth be told, there’s definitely a side to me that likes to walk around in long robes, who likes being greeted with respect at Mill Valley Market.  I get the best seat in the house during worship. And, when I visit people at home in my service as Rector, I am often given a seat at the head of the table! I hope the prayers I offer publicly are not for the sake of appearance, and I pray even more to Almighty God that I do not devour widows’ houses. Yet we all know that this parish has relied on the generosity of numerous widows over the past century to sustain our community and, yes, that includes the clergy salaries. Words to give me pause indeed!

In short, I feel a dangerous kinship with the Scribes, who were the keepers of the legal, religious, and economic apparatus of the first-century Temple in Jerusalem; and they were among Jesus’ harshest critics. You see, Jesus’ point about the widow’s mite in today’s Gospel is not so much about our financial stewardship, but about the unspeakably awful economic injustice that sat right at the heart of institutional religion of the day – in God’s name, no less. The Scribes were so wound up with the rotten core of the Temple system that they scarcely noticed the hardship they were putting on the poorest of the poor and the marginalized, widows among the most vulnerable among them. And the Scribes’ spiritual downfall is always knocking at our door. We constantly run the risk of behaving like them. Moreover, our claiming God does not automatically inoculate us against the pitfalls of grasping greed or the ignorance of real need that our drive to sustain an institution like a parish - or a home, or a business - can sometimes engender.

In today’s readings, I am most struck by the image of the widow of Zarephath picking up sticks for the final meal. Her words to Elijah, “I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die,” I hear not said with self-pity or sarcasm; but with a matter-of-factness that is both ironic and profound. Picking up the sticks presents a fidelity to the final meal, of looking into the face of dissolution and death with a kind of dignity that we might aspire to when we inevitably meet the end of the road; of accepting the vulnerability of our true powerlessness in a world where we cannot ultimately put our trust in any ruler or child of earth, for no matter what we or others do – sooner or later – we return to dust from which we were made.

This is a peculiar kind of faith that both the nameless widows in our readings today possess: a faith of embracing reality, however hard it might be, with a trust and an acceptance that are unnerving to the Scribes within all of us. This trust and acceptance are unnerving, because the reality of picking up sticks for the final meal or parting with the final pennies in one’s possession, as we hear about the widow at the Temple treasury, points to the radical poverty that is the truest reality of all our lives. It’s a reality that cuts through all the hypocrisy and vain grasping that can consume us. Truly, we own and ultimately control nothing. The pretense of the scribes is only a fantasy in which so many of us spend a great deal of time – too much time – a fantasy of control over our own destiny and material possessions. Honestly, it is a fantasy in which many of us are tempted to play God. And we must forever be wary that our religiosity and spiritual practices – the fancy robes and well-endowed furnishings – do not lead us down this road.

The widows point to the trust that rests at the foundation of true faith – a radical trust in God – and it is this kind of trust that God honors. For the widow in Zarephath, Elijah comes at the moment of greatest scarcity bringing God’s power to sustain her and her son through the famine. For the widow outside the temple, though we hear nothing about her faith, God in Christ sees her in all of her humble authenticity a faithful contrast to an unspeakably harsh injustice: one wrapped up into a social-religious-economic juggernaut presided over by the spiritually impoverished Scribes.

The irony of this contrast would probably not have been lost on the early Christian community that first heard the story in this form from Mark’s Gospel. You see the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, and the fantasy of the Scribes was destroyed along with it. In fact, the Scribes as Jesus knew them were all but lost to history after 70 – their class, wealth, influence, and way of life, inexorably intertwined with the Temple cultus, would barely survive the resulting upheaval in Judaism – and what did survive evolved into something remarkably different in later Rabbinical Judaism. But the widows pressed on, and they even became of critical importance to the early Christian community, where they were tended and empowered, and some even offered essential hospitality to the small communities gathering in the late first century and after in Jesus’ name.

The widow of Zarephath became legendary – not only because of her faith and relationship with the great prophet Elijah – but also because she was an outsider, a foreigner. Everything was against her, and yet it was she who curried God’s favor. Her offering to God by hosting Elijah, even in the face of complete destitution, is turned by grace into sustainable abundance. Once again, God sees the world entirely upside-down from our point-of-view. The least among us are noticed and nourished. The nameless receive blessing. The outsiders become insiders. The first are last, and the last are first. It is yet another teaching for all of the time we spend grasping for ourselves that the truth of faith is not found in what we crave and or in what we hold, but in what we offer. That it is only empty hands and open hearts – jugs of oil and jars of meal sometimes running almost empty – that God can fill.

It’s this spiritual teaching that we are likely to find the most frightening, because it contradicts everything the world tells us about the way reality works. We are taught to believe that only those who help themselves succeed, that “up” means having more, that our objective is always something greater than what we have and where we are now. But this is the trap of the Scribes – a trap where we devour the house of Creation to the point that she now groans in crisis, where we forget too easily that one in six of our sisters and brothers worldwide remain uncertain where their next meal is coming from, where we are insulated from the naked reality of our reliance, and indeed the reliance of all the world upon our God.

A seminarian classmate who came from a village in West Africa once remarked to me that we don’t know how much we depend upon God until we are uncertain how we are going to get food for our family in the coming week; of facing famine with no clear solution. That is the spiritual and physical reality of the widows giving of their last, picking up sticks for a final meal and offering it to God. And it is this reality of offering, service, and reliance upon God’s grace that these long robes, our parish family, and our beautiful space and our prayers and practice of coming to the table with outstretched hands are all meant to serve. Any other purpose or meaning for our common life as a Christian community is probably just dangerous fantasy.

But the good news for us is when we take these stories of widows into our hearts and recognize our own poverty – even amidst our material abundance – we are living again into our real vulnerability before our God. A vulnerability that, when we offer it to Christ and to those in most in need in the day-to-day and even moment-to-moment of our lives, God will embrace. And we may indeed discover that our jugs of oil and jars of meal are replenished each day, not so much because of our grasping and endeavors, but because of God’s grace at work around and within us. A grace we can learn to trust as we pick up the sticks for each final meal offered to God and our sisters and brothers. A grace we can count on in all the chances and changes of this life this day and always. A grace that will, if we let it, get us and the most vulnerable among us through any famine, and sustain us with an abundant love prepared for all the world from before time.

Servanthood: A Thought

2009-10-29T19:49:00.001-07:00

Servanthood is inherently subversive. Those who live into it steadfastly refuse to play according to the world's rules of power.

Bread for the Journey

2009-10-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

After a period of overwrought and half-baked arguments coming from various quarters on the late, great Anglican "crisis" there emerges an argument so nourishing that I can only call it bread for the journey.

Mark Harris has captured it here. Tobias Haller comments on it here.

But among Bishop Selby's most nourishing prose are these paragraphs, which speak to the very heart of what is happening right now in many places in the wider Church.

For me, it points to the very heart of Anglicanism, if not the work of the Holy Spirit in the present hour of our shared history:

A colleague and his partner were to register their partnership, and a number of us were invited. There was no suggestion that there would be a blessing of this union, or anything else that might cause incongruity or unrecognisability. But it did so happen that the ceremony was arranged to take place closely after the usual time of the eucharist in the local Church, to which the guests were also invited. Not surprisingly prayers were offered for the pair, and the eucharist proceeded as usual - or not quite.

When time came for the distribution of the Sacrament, nothing had been said about what was to happen. But the congregation knew what was to happen: they remained in their seats until the pair whose partnership was to be registered had received together. Where was this unscripted choreography learned? Obviously through the attendance of many in the congregation at wedding eucharists. But this was not of course a wedding - or was it? Might not this event in the distribution of the Sacrament have been a picture of what at an earlier time the Archbishop would have called 'The Body's Grace', the mediation of truth through the liturgical actions of the people, while the official Church was still struggling to avoid an affirmation it was unwilling to make.

I tell the story not to argue against those others who have decided simply to disobey the rules. I tell it rather to show that while the Primates of our Communion labour at the question of incongruity, a different perception of the truth is being recognised in the actions of the people. Nor am I telling the story to suggest that actions of that kind can serve as a substitute for a just and faithful resolution of a conflict which has hurt too many and lasted too long. I tell the story because even as hierarchies struggle to maintain rigidities in place, even as persons are hurt and their ministries denied, something else is going on, namely the emergence of the hidden wisdom of God's people, a choreography of promise, a recognition which the official Church will surely have to take seriously. That will not be (as the Archbishop [of Canterbury] quite wrongly suggests) because the Church will have ended up conforming to social mores rather than critiqued them; it will be because truth has been discovered precisely in the context of biblical and theological reflection and acted out in worship; and what the pew sheet I quoted accurately called 'the current panic' will not outlast the God whose message is not to be afraid.

At Midnight

2009-09-22T22:17:00.000-07:00

Sent to Bishop Marc by an unnamed author in prayer as Marc prepares for surgery next week...

Sung by the clergy this night at diocesan clergy conference in night prayers, set to "The Call" by Ralph Vaughan Williams:

At midnight I awake,
and looked up into the sky.
No star from among the stars' multitude
smiled on me at midnight.

At midnight my thoughts went out
into the darkness.
No luminous thought
brought me comfort at midnight.

At midnight I began to heed
the beating of my heart.
A single pulse of pain
was kindled inflamed at midnight.

At midnight I fought the battle
of human sorrows.
I could not win a decision
with all my strength at midnight.

At midnight I put my strength
in your hands:
Lord of death and life,
You keep the watch at midnight.~

A Bit of Tender Grace

2009-09-15T11:58:00.001-07:00

Left on my voicemail by my six-year-old son while I was out yesterday evening:

Daddy, please come home very fastly because I'm waiting for you. I want to play a game with you.

God bless.

Bye, bye.

Two Thoughts

2009-09-01T22:41:00.001-07:00

...on firsthand experience with the nexus of the financial and housing crises:

Truly astonishing is the capacity of big banks to create huge bureaucratic messes with relatively small sums.
It is hardest to go toe-to-toe with a bureaucracy where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing ... and the institution has many more hands and far less grace than a Hindu deity.

Eyes on the Floor

2009-07-10T23:40:00.000-07:00

Posts at Episcopal Café from General Convention

postings are in reverse chronological order

Matters of Conscience, Matters of Psyche

Less is More

Washing Socks

An Epochal Boundary

Reclaiming Solid Ground

On Truth Telling

Title IV - Moved and Moving

B033 - A Festering Wound

B033 and Elephants

Process and Story

Title IV 101

Reflections from General Convention

Learning from the Floor

2009-07-08T00:21:00.001-07:00

A rather gloomy deputy from The Diocese of the Hundred Acre Wood attempts to move an amendment on the floor of the House as part of a fun exercise in the legislative process during orientation on Tuesday. Cinderella and Captain Jack Sparrow joined the cast of deputies from the Disney Province of The Episcopal Church.

Now just who said Robert's Rules of Order are boring?

Watch for my upcoming reflection from Tuesday over at Episcopal Café.

Wisdom for General Convention

2009-07-04T23:02:00.000-07:00

As I prepare to fly to Anaheim first thing Monday for my first "official" involvement in the General Convention of The Episcopal Church, a few tidbits of wisdom have spoken greatly to me in recent days. Here are two. . .

The first is an admonition for all of us offered with Tobias Haller's usual succinct wit:

One of the tragedies of institutions is that they so often betray their mission to preserve their structure.

Can't wait to see ya' in Anaheim, Tobias!

The second nugget of wisdom, while longer, offers an insight with which I am wholly sympathetic. In a way, it sums up why I have largely stopped opining on the formation of a new North American "province" hostile to The Episcopal Church out of various splinter groups. And it is offered by one of my favorite people in all of the Anglican Communion, Jenny Plane Te Paa, whom I look forward to seeing in Anaheim, even if only from afar:

I have, on one hand, become especially afraid of those very few bishops and archbishops of this our beloved Communion who have demonstrably indicated their unwillingness to serve the common good, and also in a sense to betray their own baptismal and ordination vows by refusing to participate in eucharistic worship with other baptised Anglicans in their insistence that God loves only some, and who further insist that there is indeed a portion of humanity who are not worthy of full respect, dignity or inclusion.

I have not, on the other hand, been unduly distracted by the clamour of these aggressive alarmists because, as one immensely privileged to move around the Communion, what I also bear witness to serves to relativise everything, and so it is with absolute confidence that I can say there are far more Anglicans getting on with the pressing business of being God's mission people than there are those fretting over whether or not inclusion is a gospel imperative.

I have believed and have been saying for some time now that for the sake of the Communion it is imperative for us all to look beyond the vitriol, the hysteria, the noisy gongs, instead to notice anew all that has and all who have actually remained constant, to notice anew all those whose dedication, sacrifice, service and commitment to God’s mission has not altered and will not ever be altered one tiny bit no matter how many threats, claims and abuses are being made at the level of male church leadership struggles. I have been encouraged to look again at the exemplary work and witness of many thousands of unsung Anglican men and women, young and old, lay and ordained, those whose lives of selfless mostly voluntary service, will not and cannot ever be disrupted by the prospect of schism, by legal claims and counter claims or by indecently ferocious doctrinal arguments.

from Episcopal Café

If you’re gracious enough to still be reading my occasional posts these days, you'll find a lot more from me and a sea of insightful fellow bloggers over at Episcopal Café quite soon. Thanks to Jim Naughton for generously welcoming more of my ramblings! For more local folk (or local at heart), check out, too, the Diocese of California's General Convention site.

Blessings all, and pray for everyone gathering in Anaheim, that the truth may be told with a grace that only the Spirit can bring and that Christ may move among this portion of the Body for the sake of all God's beloved children.

More Lessons in Faith

2009-07-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

Listen to the audio

Readings for Proper 8

Our gospel this day is a remarkable passage, as it poses to us two memorable stories of healing -- one nested in the other. I don't think it at all a mistake or even a moment of sloppy literary skill that poses the scene in the crowd between Jairus' request and Jesus arriving at his house. Mark, for all of this gospel's efficiency in disclosing to us who Jesus is, wants us to sit and pray with this remarkable contrast of narrative -- to take in the incredible disparity of position between Jairus and the nameless woman in the crowd, and the one thread that connects them: the thread of faith. There is a profound lesson there: one of deep grace.

So many who approach Jesus for healing in the gospels demand some action from him, whether it's instruction, a visit, or a prayer of the Son of God. In this way, the contrast between Jairus, a faithful leader of the local synagogue, and the woman suffering for so long at the margins of her community, could not be more striking. Jairus is presumably respected, so much so, everyone in town turns out to see what will be the outcome of his daughter's illness and how Jesus will respond to his request. Everyone knows Jairus’ name. But the woman who suffers from hemorrhaging, rendered constantly ritually unclean and therefore likely an outcast, has no name and is virtually invisible. What they share is a common vision that they are now rendered powerless: Jairus by his daughter's grave illness; the woman by her having spent everything on physicians who could not help her.

Both learn that faith's day is truly when we find ourselves up against the ineffable mystery of our constant vulnerability. . .When we are most open to God because all our human power is rendered useless.

Yet there is a peculiar and fascinating edge the woman seems to have in this over Jairus, for she is the one who receives from Jesus nothing less than commendation for her faith. She is the one who demands essentially no action of Jesus, takes an enormous risk by merely reaching out her hand, forges relationship with the divine with a humility that should, in many respects, silence the lot of us. Jairus' daughter will be raised up, too, of course, in a great public spectacle. But the woman lost in the crowd is the one who possesses the faith that has made her well, a faith truer, deeper, and broader than the well-healed and well-positioned. When she comes to Jesus with fear and trembling, it might be because she fears to be scolded or worse for making Jesus unclean with her touch. Or perhaps because she has been an opportunist, seizing the moment of the pressing crowds and the hope stoked up around Jesus, Jairus, and his sick daughter. Or perhaps it is simply fear of reaching out without permission or even acknowledgment. Or perhaps it is because at last she has come face to face with God and turned herself utterly over, undone to the core and at last re-made from the inside out physically, spiritually, and emotionally by grace.

Those of you who were here last week may remember Jesus scolding the disciples, even, for their lack of faith as they were tossed about in a boat by the storm. Yet again, by contrast, we witness this nameless woman and see her faith commended. It seems that she stands, in Jesus' eyes, head and shoulders above the rest. And with that, we are reminded that our God sees the world turned almost 180 degrees from our perspective. The least powerful, the most in need, are those most noticed by grace, most vulnerable to it, most ready to embrace it. Jairus needs to be told to continue -- to stay the course of faith. The woman needs to be told nothing.

So then, what is faith? Far from simple blind assent or setting aside intellect, faith is, of course, founded ultimately in relationship. But it is the final hope, too, of those who are the least among us. It is the complete undoing of all sense of power over ourselves, and a giving up of everything to a God -- however dimly we may perceive that God -- who will. . .

Well, who knows what God will do?

From this woman we learn what it truly means to fear God. Not so much to fear God's wrath as some might have us. But to fear God's love. A radical love that does not simply demand a little or even a lot, but everything, down to our last shred of hope. And then remakes us and restores us to a vision that only God could hold: that God holds for all of us and all of creation until time is no more, death is undone, and we behold our Maker face-to-face.

Portia and Prop 8

2009-05-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

The hollow case for Proposition 8 won a hollow victory today in California - one that I find positively Shakespearean the more I reflect on it. Remember Merchant of Venice? Set aside the rank anti-Semitism of the play with me for just a minute and recall Portia's clever solution to Shylock's sadistic collateral from the merchant Antonio for his failure to pay a debt:

PORTIA
A pound of that same merchant's flesh is thine:
The court awards it, and the law doth give it.

SHYLOCK
Most rightful judge!

PORTIA
And you must cut this flesh from off his breast:
The law allows it, and the court awards it.

SHYLOCK
Most learned judge! A sentence! Come, prepare!

PORTIA
Tarry a little; there is something else.
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh:'
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.

The Supreme Court of California, in a subtle but brilliant decision, ducked the veiled threat of recall by Prop 8 supporters and avoided taking the blood of tangible rights and privileges from same-sex couples. And I mean that covenanted blood protected - if not by marriage for those fortunate in timing, then by domestic partnership laws already offering equal protection.

There's more than a bit of divine humor in the Portia-like decision. Prop 8 supporters knew a direct attack on rights and privileges of couples would never fly in the polls -- even less so in the courtroom. So they settled for the idol of the term "marriage," but without real substance save perhaps social recognition.

That is now the true moral disappointment for couples seeking equal protection, at least it seems to me: the loss of the social recognition of the term "marriage." But time, the arc of justice, and possibly even the divine sense of humor are on their side. Separate but equal is a legal foundation of shifting sand. Legal "marriage" will be theirs again in the long run.

Prop 8 supporters may cheer over their "pound of flesh" and the slowly separating pottage they have unwittingly wrought with no fewer than three legal classes of protected couples in California: those "straight" and married, same-sex couples married between the last court decision and the passage of Prop 8, and those receiving rights and privileges under domestic partnership laws.

But the cheers ring hollow, because the "pound of flesh" is less substantive and more a mere ghost of definition under law. It has no tangible substance in California except a social projection without distinction of rights and privileges. . . a dumb idol, legally speaking, and perhaps morally and spiritually, too.

The hollow case has become the hollow definition.

Don’t look now, but Prop 8 supporters, for all of their money and efforts, have secured a Pyrrhic victory – one that has eviscerated their cause as they are shepherded into a cold, narrow definition of their own legalism just as Shylock was.

Thankfully, God's grace is more generous than Shakespeare. But I have to chuckle while standing in solidarity with my LGBT sisters and brothers.

Portia would be proud...

Updates:

Bishop Marc Andrus responds
Zoe Cole offers more legal perspective on the decision
Will Scott offers moving personal witness

Does it Really Matter?

2009-05-04T07:50:00.000-07:00

This morning over at Episcopal Café, Jim Naughton writes:

About halfway through weighing some of the issues that I’ve written about here before, I had a sudden realization: reflecting on Rowan Williams’ letter wasn’t a worthwhile use of my time; writing it was not a worthwhile use of his. The issues at stake have become so trivial—We are not debating right and wrong, we are debating whether there should be trifling penalties for giving offense to other members of the Communion.—that to engage them at all compromises our moral standing and diminishes our ability to speak credibly on issues of real importance.

This isn’t to say that we don’t have to make a decision about whether to accede to the archbishop’s proposal—and I suppose I think that we shouldn’t because it would only encourage him to make other such requests—just that whether we accede or not make very little difference to the world, to the Communion, to our ecumenical partners, to our church, or even to a Communion news junky like me.

I think Jim is correct. The fact that The Archbishop of Canterbury has very limited authority to act is not a problem, but a blessing. The Communion, after all, is not the domain of prelates, as some would have it, but a fellowship of churches made up of millions of people in real, embodied relationships around common mission. And that common mission is not fundamentally about who's ordaining whom, but about who's fed, healed, and nurtured in the grace of God. This is what we have to offer a world in need, and what our leadership is called to nurture.

The rest is largely window dressing.

Nothing New

2008-12-03T16:03:00.000-08:00

So some hubbub is circulating about the announcement of a "new Anglican Province" by a small group of our more disgruntled brothers and sisters. The Episcopal Café provides some additional food for thought. (Meanwhile, almost as if on cue, the Roman Catholic Church has now named an apparent new threat to the Vatican's sense of order -- a call by the UN for an end to the criminalization of homosexuality.)

My response, quite frankly, is a shrug of the shoulders with a twinge of sadness. This has been the goal the whole time for the breakaway dioceses, parishes, provinces, and their leadership. Disagreements over human sexuality were a convenient rallying point for a new order. So they're declaring it at last. Maybe they will take some of the rancor with them. Merry Christmas? Or "Hummmmbug"?

What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9

Yes, they will co-opt the name "Anglican" as schismatic groups have done in the past. But as has been pointed out in a number of places already, the new "province" won't be formally part of the Communion until (if ever) properly ratified by the Anglican Consultative Council -- that is, by a solid majority of representatives of the provinces of the greater Communion. It is with multiple ironies I write: Best of British luck!

In short, a new church is in the making. All the power to them, I suppose, but major hurdles await, far beyond the formal process of recognition. Namely, they will have to come to terms with their own differences in a newly "purified" body of Christians: purified, that is, of gays and lesbians and all of us "reappraising" folk. That leaves disagreements over the ordination of women, ecclesiastical structure, piety, liturgical norms, and even finer points of theology to be reckoned with. . .

Life will go on. General Convention meets this summer. 98% of The Episcopal Church will remain just that: The Episcopal Church, with all of its diversity, rough-and-tumble, and shared history and mission.

Tobias Haller offers some sharp insight into the roots of schismatic and otherwise disagreeable ecclesiology and behavior. Mark Harris is also keeping well up with everything in Anglican Schism Land.

Aside from that, I have little to add, except to wish all, discontented or no, a Holy Advent. 'Tis a time of waiting as much as preparation.

I close with this before getting back to the real work with real people in this real place:

Making the ways straight for God has much more to do with reconciliation and lifting up the poor and the voiceless than it does with schism.

Jesus would weep -- were he not, it seems at least to me, so busy with more important things.

The Hollow Case Wins

2008-11-05T09:54:00.000-08:00

Proposition 8's narrow win in California is a defeat for basic equality, which is more than just a political issue: it's a theological one. Jesus' vision for the new community that he called "the kingdom of heaven" was fundamentally about breaking down the walls of separation often defined by un-equal treatment. Martin Luther King, Jr., captured this essential piece of Christian theology when he popularized "the beloved community" as a vision of God's future for the human family and all of creation.

Speaking as an American citizen, Prop 8 represents a sorry collision between the democratic ideals of the referendum process and the obligation of the judiciary in a democracy to uphold the basic rights of minorities -- over and against the potential tyranny of the majority. The irreconcilable conflict of rights now written in the California state constitution will be the subject of many court battles to come, and rightly so. However much the Prop 8 proponents may cheer at their victory this day, I take hope that their success has far less margin than the referendum vote of only a few years ago -- one that they argued they were defending.

And what were they defending?

Those of us who live in communities where gay and lesbian couples are openly sharing covenanted relationships -- yes, that's what I and many other Christians call marriage -- and some of them raising families. . . Well, we see no threat whatsoever to heterosexual marriages. Indeed, my marriage has been strengthened by their witness.

Prop 8 rode a dubious, hollow case that somehow its rejection would mean gay and lesbian marriage would be taught in schools. State educators made it clear this was not at all true. Another spurious claim was that clergy would be forced by the state to marry same-sex couples. This is as naked a red herring as there ever was. Then there's the idea that traditional marriage, whatever we mean by that, needs to be "protected." Again, I ask (and I have yet to hear a cogent answer) from what, exactly?

Behind these flimsy arguments are the real questions that need to be addressed, if we listen closely. Here are only two of them:

Is there truly a threat that same-sex marriages pose to the integrity of the household, Christian or otherwise?

Do we still dare to believe that people can "catch" homosexuality, as though it's a disease?

Proposition 8 is a sham and a shame. It enshrines fear and discrimination at the constitutional level in California. It affirms ignorance over compassionate knowledge. It throws a thin veil of abstract morality over bigotry and intolerance. It idolizes gender and sexuality, when true marriage is fundamentally about neither. And contrary to its disciples' assertions, Prop 8 will not save marriage. Nor will fear. I wish and pray that many setting out to "save marriage" would stop attempting to do so through fear. Fear has destroyed many a marriage, after all. And fear undermines the God-given dignity of the human family.

I only echo Martin Luther King, Jr., by writing this:

Given the long arc of history in this country, Proposition 8 will not ultimately stand. Hollow cases built on fear and ignorance cannot remain for long in God's time. Nor can they, by definition, withstand the light of reason.

My thoughts and prayers are very much with our sisters and brothers who are hurt by this mean proposition. Their dignity and future security is what is truly threatened, and that of their children. This is the true offense to morality.

Long may we defend them: with renewed and prayerful patience, solidarity, and witness to the fruits of covenant already among us.

The World has Changed

2008-11-05T09:01:00.000-08:00

I shared with Hiroko last night as the electoral college votes locked in a victory for Barack Obama that this was the first time I can remember in at least eight years I was truly proud to be an American.

Obama has proven once again that Americans refuse to be victims of history, even their own. The grip of the withering hand of racism was loosened. Now my son, another child of two national heritages and two racial identities, can see in the eyes of his president an experience, a life not so very far removed from his own. Over dinner last night, even before the results were absolutely clear, Daniel explained in his five-year-old matter-of-factness that Obama had won. It was like him stating the sky is blue, water is wet, or God is good. In a profound moment, Daniel was stating an existential reality that many of us more jaded adults scarcely believed possible even a few months ago.

Obama is his president.

And I wonder at the mobilization of countless young people in this country who were not so very long ago written off as disinterested and apathetic. Some of them right here in the parish and community I serve poured enormous energy and countless hours into changing the electoral landscape of the country. Their success asserts that beyond all the cynicism of the last decade is the reality that we remain, fundamentally, a people of hope.

We have a leader now who apparently refuses to live out of a place of anger or fear. Who plants hope with a good dose of humility. Who admits his mistakes while carrying a vision for the future. Sure, our president-elect will not be perfect. He will sometimes disappoint me.

But he embodies and lives into a reality to which we are all called:

The world has changed. But we have a say in what tomorrow will be. It's time we claim that and act on it.

God be with him.

An Unfair God

2008-09-21T13:35:00.000-07:00

Sermon delivered at Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley

Sunday, September 21st, 2008.

Proper 20 Readings

Well, this week the world changed, didn’t it? Over night the rules on stock trades tightened, an esteemed Wall Street institution disappeared, a huge international insurer was buttressed by the federal bank, and both presidential campaigns completely re-tooled their messages around that now old adage: “It’s the economy, stupid.” And after a week where some people woke up to find themselves without work, without pensions, or at least somewhere they didn’t expect to find themselves on the vast spectrum between lots and nothing. . . central banks worldwide

began coordinating their efforts, and our national leadership decided it was time for the government to work out a way to bail out the free markets to the tune of $700 billion. It’s a figure that seems too huge to me to imagine. Then the papers report that part of this will involve raising the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion, a truly staggering number indeed. I’ll stop there. Many of you know the story better than I.

So why bring up the greatest financial meltdown, some say, since the Great Depression, in a sermon on a sunny morning at Church of Our Saviour? Why talk about dollars, debt, and the economy at all in a liturgy all about God? Because, of course, first and foremost, some of our members live, work, and breathe in the world of numbers and finance. Some of our sisters and brothers have been hit by the unprecedented swings in the markets this week – and have lost. And all of us are uncertain about what happens next. And then, in comes today’s very strange parable about simple street economics, and I am left wondering just what is the connection between Wall Street, Main Street, and the Jesus’ imagined street where the workers are hanging out waiting for employment in the vineyard.

Over lunch this week, a colleague put it quite simply: It’s not fair. Period. We are rankled, some openly, others quietly inside, about CEO’s walking away from failed financial giants with tens of millions in golden parachutes while nameless employees of the same companies, good, hardworking people who have devoted decades to the institution, are left with valueless savings or pensions and nowhere to turn. We might be rankled, too, if we were in Jesus’ parable, first to show up to the vineyard but discovering at the end of the day we receive no more than those who arrived at 5 o’clock. And might not we be annoyed with the landowner, God even, who argues like any governing board or manager that we received what we agreed to – CEO or office assistant – along with all the risks, perks, and privileges. It’s not fair. And if Wall Street and the current mess in the nation’s economy punches a hole in good old-fashioned notions of American fairness, then so does today’s Gospel. Full stop.

In some ways, it’s even easier to cope with Wall Street’s unfairness. Risk, we could say, is part of the game we sign up for when we invest either ourselves, our capital, or both. But we didn’t really sign up to invest in God’s universe. . . we simply are here. So if God is just as unfair, maybe we have even a greater cause to complain. At the heart of our theological angst is the same fear at the heart of the greater world’s angst this week: that bad things happen to good people, and rarely do we receive what we expect, what we consider fair. The world, the universe, and even God’s way of being among us seems much of the time unpredictable and capricious. In the kingdom of God, Jesus says, the last will be first and the first will be last. There doesn’t seem much wiggle room for proclaiming “not fair!” and no cosmic or heavenly SEC, federal regulatory commission, congressional hearing, or even a Supreme Court to adjudicate the final decision. Now, who wants a God like that? Arbitrary, it seems, and unable to connect with our notions of fairness to the point that our faith in a greater power who loves us might be profoundly shaken.

The deeper challenge that I hear Jesus posing for us his followers, as well as his earliest disciples, is that our notions of fairness often mask our desire to get ahead. And get ahead on entirely the wrong terms and over the wrong things. My inner dialogue often goes something like this: if only the playing field were really level, I could get ahead. Why? Well, because I’m smarter, tougher, and more resilient than a lot of other people. I show up early and I stay late. I take on more. I work harder.

Leveling the playing field, a lot of the time, is really about leveling the playing field for me. Fairness is fair only when it gives me an edge, an advantage. So I can show up to the vineyard early and get one of the better-endowed contracts. That’s what the landowner means in a profound way in today’s parable when he questions the fairness argument; when he asks those who are grumbling because they came early; when he asks them quite simply if they did not receive what they agreed to. They really want to be ahead of those loafers who came late. Because they believe they deserve it more. Today’s parable is a stinging indictment of our very human proclivity to justify ourselves, to believe ourselves to be more righteous, more deserving than others, to see ourselves at the front of the line when it comes to God’s grace. And one way we do that is by declaring “it ain’t fair.” Barbara Brown Taylor puts it this way:

[Today’s parable] sounds quite different from the end of the line, after all, than it does from the front of the line, but isn’t it interesting that 99 percent of us hear it from front row seats? We are the ones who have gotten the short end of the stick; we are the ones who have been gypped. We are the ones who have gotten up early and worked hard and stayed late and all for what? So that some backward householder can come along and start at the wrong end of the line, treating us just like the ne’er do wells who do not even get dressed until noon!

So does that archetypal CEO with the $20 million deserve what he gets any more than his co-worker elsewhere in the company who lost everything? The world’s answer might be yes and it might be no, or it might wash its hands of the matter and call it capitalism or the risks and rewards of the marketplace. Maybe we could delve deep into the personal history of each person and the string of choices that led one to the top of the corporate ladder and the other one into a more obscure, less financially secure position. Or we might push it back a layer and talk about their education, or their opportunities growing up, or their parents’ examples. How far back would we go? Where would we stop? But maybe, given today’s Gospel, we’re asking the wrong questions.

It might be more true, Jesus argues to us out of today’s parable, to recognize that we all came into this life with nothing, and we leave it with nothing. . . save, of course, the real wage that God has promised. And to understand that wage, look at what happens, my sisters and brothers, when we come to the altar for Eucharist. Each of us, no matter where we appear on the socio-economic spectrum; whether we won, lost, or drew even this week; whether we work hard or enjoy leisure more; whether we deserve it or not; even whether we’ve been good or bad or indifferent. . . each of us approaches the altar and receives exactly the same wage: the bread and the wine, the body and blood of Christ crucified and risen for us. For that is where our true identity resides. Not in our portfolios or positions. Not in the stature of our work or our status in community. Trust me, don’t let the nice clothes, the snazzy titles, or the high pulpit fool you. The last will be first and the first will be last. It’s the world that measures in terms of economic prowess and political power. God’s realm looks at human value and identity through a radically different lens than do we much of the time.

Paul’s Letter to the church in Philippi caps today’s Gospel message with this little tidbit: neither our life, nor our death, is as important as Christ’s life in us. Full stop. It’s that resurrected life in Christ that can help us turn to one another in these tumultuous times and hold each other up. Christ’s life in us can lead us out into a world that is struggling and suffering in the present chaos. . .lead us out into it with renewed purpose, where we live no longer for ourselves, but for God’s Creation, God’s People, and a world in need of hope. A purpose that transcends Wall Street and Main Street, and lives wherever compassion renews our humanity; leaving behind the fairness argument and instead working for justice: and that is whatever restores relationship, human dignity, and community. And in doing so, that life in Christ guides us and nourishes us through the uncharted wilderness and leads us, together, towards the Promised Land.

Quotation from “Beginning at the End” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons from the Episcopal Series of the Protestant Radio Hour by Barbara Brown Taylor (Forward Movement Publications, 1990).

Prayers for Lambeth

2008-07-22T06:23:00.000-07:00

The truth will set you free...

On Pilgrimage

2008-06-20T21:48:00.000-07:00

Gates, Walls, and Towers

Holy Places, Holy Service

A Youth Pilgrimage to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York City

June 21st - 29th, 2008

Please pray for us pilgrims. May we find and be found by Christ!

Psalm 122

I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’

Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.
Jerusalem—built as a city that is bound firmly together.

To it the tribes go up,

the tribes of the Lord, as was decreed for Israel,

to give thanks to the name of the Lord.

For there the thrones for judgement were set up,

the thrones of the house of David.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:

‘May they prosper who love you.

Peace be within your walls,

and security within your towers.’

For the sake of my relatives and friends

I will say, ‘Peace be within you.’

For the sake of the house of the Lord our God,

I will seek your good.

Marital Umbrage

2008-06-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

A great deal of umbrage has been bandied about in recent days in the blogosphere over a recent pastoral letter. It was sent by Bishop Marc Andrus to the clergy and people of the Episcopal Diocese of California outlining pastoral guidelines for how we are to treat the new reality of same-sex marriage unleashed by the California State Supreme Court a few weeks ago. A similar, more succinct pastoral letter was sent by +Mary Gray-Reeves, the new bishop of El Camino Real, one of our three sibling Episcopal dioceses in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Not all of the umbrage has come from the usual suspects. This piece posted by Lisa Fox is one example among many that worry what has happened here has opened the door to further lawlessness in the church. Somehow now, we dare not claim any righteous indignation at our brothers and sisters who have flouted canons by writing The Episcopal Church out of their diocesan constitutions and are making a mad dash for the guilded red doors. . . and trying to take them, too, on the way out.

Perhaps we can no longer condemn that as vociferously as some of us have. Then again, that doesn't worry me too much. Righteous indignation is highly overrated.

Bishop Marc, it seems to me, has chosen along with his Diocese a very careful, tenuous path of grace in a conflicted Church. Following his recommendation, I informed my vestry yesterday evening that I would no longer preside over a marriage of any kind until The Episcopal Church has settled on a way forward that honors the covenants of all couples with equality. Rather, I will treat all couples who approach me for marriage equally by offering counseling and blessing, and referring them to the civil authorities to publicly declare their vows as legally binding. By equality, I don't mean political equality (although that naturally follows), but equality in terms of the recognition of God's grace.

A parishioner asked me yesterday if I was therefore withholding the sacrament of marriage. After reflection, I decided I wasn't because I can't. It is the couple who engage in the sacrament of marriage. At best, as a priest, I can only name it and declare it publicly. The sacrament of marriage between couples of all sorts will continue with or without my help in that particular way. In a curious sense, that's liberating Good News, as I fast from this part of ordained priesthood.

I believe in my bones that I must do my utmost to follow the discipline of the Church to which I have pledged a good deal of my life. Clearly the Book of Common Prayer and the canons as they are presently structured define Christian marriage as being between a man and a woman. I cannot, in good conscience, use the marriage liturgy of the greater Church to solemnize anything other. Bishop Marc appears to feel much the same way. Indeed, his authority is limited in that he cannot unilaterally change these definitions. I applaud him for that admission.

But nor can I ignore the fruits of the Spirit I see in my brothers and sisters who have heard God's call into a covenant that the Church does not yet, as a whole, recognize. So, where gender is the only measure of difference, to solemnize one coupling over another creates a hierarchy of goodness and grace that I no longer believe in. I'm not sure Jesus, given his proclivity to reach out to the very least among us, would believe in it either.

I am ever more convinced that we have mistakenly, for many centuries, hung a theology of marriage on two all-too-fragile constructs that have changed radically over time, cultures, and places: gender and the regulation of sex. As a married man for over eight years, I have learned that marriage is anything but about these two things. Gender is a highly malleable confluence of biology, sociology, and behavior. Sure, sexual intercourse is a fun gift, but outside the realm of addiction, it is an unpredictable occurrence that has very little air time in the overall scheme of a marriage. Moreover, reducing the validity of marriage to anatomy is the height of absurdity, given the beautiful fruits we see in marriages where sexual anatomy and intercourse have been compromised or even eliminated by infirmity, age, or mere genetics.

No, this is about covenant rooted in those pesky vows that all married people are tempted to shirk from time to time. Strangely enough, the vows say nothing about sex. Only the state, which tends to build laws around the measurable, physical, and quantifiable, will occasionally dabble in sex when it tries to determine the legitimacy of a marriage. It talks about consummation, which has that awful root found in "consume." But even then, it relies largely on the word of one or both parties. And all of us know that sex devoid of the often painfully hard work of love never saved a marriage. Indeed, most states have learned to get out of the business of regulating sex, treating it as a private matter between consenting adults, married or not. Only violence remains forbidden in most places with decent jurisprudence, and marriage is no excuse.

To talk about sex coldly and clinically for a moment: it is largely driven by seasons, moons, hormones, and the still mysterious science of attraction. Devoid of greater context, it can both give rise to life and death. Much of the time, of course, it does neither. Yet again, devoid of context, this strange gift woven by our Creator through evolution into the fabric of humanity seems to have very little moral character in and of itself. So here I agree with even the most adamant of the self-proclaimed orthodox: when sex happens and between whom is what really matters. That is what makes sexual congress moral or not. But even so, holy sexual intimacy is a humorous, capricious, and odd but familiar guest along for the ride in marriage, not the marriage itself. Sexual intimacy is just one manifestation among many of the mysterious joys that come through the growing knowledge of another human being imbued with the grace of Christ Jesus.

Sexual orientation appears to be given for some, malleable for others, but deeply shrouded in the mystery of life like the ephemeral nature of attraction itself. Why one sort should be favored over another appears increasingly strange to me, arbitrary and unreasonable, the creation of a hierarchy for hiearchy's sake. Specious claims of the species dying for lack of offspring still bounce around the web like spitwads in an undisciplined classroom. Every study of substance I have seen says that if we let everyone couple or not according their orientation and inclination tomorrow, there will still be a huge number of naturally conceived children to grow up and assume their place in the future.

And marriage is not ultimately about children, either. We all know couples who are happily married without children or the possibility of them. I have yet to tire of paraphrasing Ed Friedman in A Failure of Nerve when he reminds us that all good parents must learn that their salvation does not depend on their children. Children are only some of the strangers who benefit from a healthy household -- strangers in our midst who need love, care, and concern from a varitable host of folk -- not simply two parents with the right combination of sexual anatomy or social exhibition of gender. The nuclear family myth is dying in our culture. Let it, I say. Afterwards, there will still be plenty of mother-father families around nurturing happy families. So, too, will there be single-parent households and adoptive families, extended families, and blended families. All of them raising children will share one thing in common: they will need a great deal of help from the outside to be successful. Let us restore what the ancients knew without thinking: children need a whole community of households and mentors and a God to help them become generous, loving adults -- not merely life in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Rumor has it that the Roman Catholic Church is presently questing to theologically demonstrate that men and women must complement each other in marriage in order to be whole. I found a manifestation of this in a children's book on the Creation I pulled off a shelf in a California mission bookstore near my home a few months ago. It said that God created man and woman, and that they must marry each other in order to be fully human. Truly, this is a strange teaching, even if we set aside the terrible examples all around us of lives broken in unhappy marriages. For any cursory read of scripture and the Christian tradition leads to the conclusion that Jesus most probably wasn't married. Was he therefore less than fully human? To argue so would undermine a core doctrine of orthodoxy by virtually every Christian's standard. Moreover, where does this leave the celibate living in Holy Orders? Or the millions of single people of the world who have found fulfillment in their life with God and community?

No, the notion of gender complementarity has not the least bit convinced me that same-sex covenants are somehow unworthy of the Church's notice. Even less that they are unworthy of God's.

Marriage at its root is about covenant: upholding, nurturing, and honoring in a mutual, faithful, forgiving relationship. The pledge to build up trust over many years through thick and thin. To lead one another through the ups and downs of this life and to form and sustain a household together -- that little building block of the greater community that provides stability and hospitality. When marriages fail, the state talks coolly about breaking up households into smaller economic units. The Church in its sorrow talks about this, if at all, almost in terms of spiritual surgery. When Jesus talked about divorce, however necessary it might sometimes be, he appears to me to say that it is only a reflection of that which threatens to shatter all human relationships: the brokenness found in the human heart.

So even the best love in the world needs covenant: covenant that models loyalty, friendship, compassion, spiritual, emotional, and economic support, and all the other life-giving ways of relating that hold this little planet of ours together and mirror God's grace for us. Covenant rooted in stories that transcend gender and sex are easily found in our holiest writ: God, Abraham, and Sarah; Ruth and Naomi; Jonathan and David; Christ and the Church; Paul and those annoyingly fickle Christian communities he helped found. Marriage is meant to model covenants of all kinds. On the other hand, it is but one of many forms of covenant rooted in the water-is-thicker-than-blood theology of baptism. This is the same baptism that prompted Paul to write that our unity in Christ breaks down all distinctions, including this one: "In Christ there is no longer male and female. . ."

But we are where we are. The State of California has gone (perhaps temporarily, though I pray not) where we as a Church have not yet dared to tread. But many of us feel called by God to go there, too, while a few portions of the Anglican Communion and an even smaller portion of The Episcopal Church have decided that they will make this as difficult and painful a choice as possible, hanging all other mission if necessary. . .that so cosmic is gender and sex in marriage that even our common life in Christ must apparently be eclipsed and, indeed shattered.

Not so long ago Bishop Marc taught me that diabolos carries in its Greek parts dia (by means of) and bolos (boulder) the implication of shattering something beautiful, like throwing a stone through a stained glass window. It could be said therefore that we in this Diocese, like many across the Anglican Communion, are still confronted with a choice that smacks of the diabolical:

Of working to honor the faithful covenants of those most closely entrusted to our care -- those whom we know as real, fallible human beings made in the image of God -- and our unique witness to the spiritual fruits of their most hallowed relationships. . .

And therefore annoying those who know little to nothing of these couples, their everyday lives, where they come from, how they met, how they love one another, except perhaps in the cold imaginings of the most clinical variety. Of risking that this annoyance will provoke another stone to be cast at the fragile panes of something we hold with strangers and intimates alike around the world: communion with God in Christ.

As painful as this reality is, it strikes me as far preferable to continuing to abandon or ignore those we are called to love and nurture in every way, of turning our face away from the face of Christ in a good many of our sisters and brothers. . .only to please or appease those who know them least, whether bishop, archbishop, or priest. Or should we prefer perpetuating injustice to our own and the violation of a prayerful conscience so that we may, for a time, take an unholy peace by mollifying a frequently disinterested ecclesiastical power -- disinterested until threats suit its ends?

While our violation of canons by what we are doing in this case is quite arguable (I believe we have pushed their limits, but not transgressed them), amid the half-veiled or fully naked calls that we are anarchists and rejecters of the rule of law, I am reminded of the legacy of civil disobedience. Is there such a thing in an ecclesiastical setting? It was St. Augustine who argued that an unjust law is no law at all. Perhaps we are starting to point towards this ancient truth in our actions at this time.

We are called to minister to people, not powers. If truth be told, we are called to attend to Christ in each other first, not the limits of canons and carefully worded structures. This is a hard truth, for we rely on our canons and constitution to hold for us some sense of unity and community in a fractious world. But, in truth, the canons and constitutions are imperfect reflections of our faith in a perfect God. We must be forever cautious, at least this side of God's promised Reign, not to confuse one for the other. That surely is one reason Christ quoted the ancient Jewish teaching that the law is only properly understood and anchored upon love of God and love of neighbor.

But we have endeavored to honor the canons as best we can, while knowing that law and our ability to abide by them has limits that are mysteriously and constantly tested by a capricious Spirit -- a Spirit who sometimes might even rattle around state supreme courts and be found in controversial judicial decisions. We have endeavored to honor the canons in an effort to show we honor Communion.

We should expect heat just the same. . .umbrage, curses, annoyance. That is our cross to bear.

In my most doubting moments, I remember the counsel of Gamaliel. In my brightest, most jubilant moments, I remember Christ victorious on the cross. We walk with some humility in either case, or at least we should.

After all, loving our neighbors as ourselves is a risky business, even in a country as free as ours.

Hiatus Thoughts

2008-05-17T04:36:00.001-07:00

It never ceases to amaze me that all the truly interesting and important things tend to happen while I'm out of town!

After a day of tootling around Guam with Hiroko, Daniel, parents, and in-laws (and having a good time!), and on an evening before Hiroko and I renew our vows as a married couple before our family and God's people, I sat down to read more about the California Supreme Court decision to overturn the ban on gay and lesbian marriage. The decision itself strikes me as remarkable in the careful distinctions it draws. Tobias Haller lifts up some of the important points of the ruling germane to assertions regularly made in opposition to same-gendered covenants. Bishop Marc has already offered a response to the decision, and the San Diego Union-Tribune posts a report that contrasts the views over the question: is this at root a civil rights issue, or a religious-spiritual one?

My response is fundamentally this: What's the difference? How we treat one another both in terms of rights and policy as well as personally is profoundly spiritual. It stems from the summary of the Law that Jesus quotes in his teachings. It is Gospel, it seems to me.

On the related question about the place of the Church in all this business about marriage, I'm of a school of sacramental theology that thinks thus:

Two adults "marry" one another when drawn together by God -- nobody marries them. In this way, marriage is a human response to the mystery of a divine gift: mutual desire and self-offering for companionship, stability, and intimacy. Sexuality in its broadest sense (not narrowly defined as intercourse), is a manifestation of this desire, and it therefore has a strongly sacramental character when expressed in the context of prayerful, loving covenant.
The state, not the Church, confers the legal rights, protections, and responsibilities that support the resulting (expanded) household. In this way, the state defines the public/political dimension of marriage in regulating the household as an economic and legal entity.
Marriage as an institution is largely human in origin. Adam and Eve, contrary to the myth we all seem to have inherited, were not formally married! I note, too, the important witness of numerous couples who have lived for years in healthy covenant without engaging in a formal public union. Moreover, Jesus seems to stress this point about marriage as human institution in Mark 12:25 and Matthew 22:30. History and tradition tell us that marriage has evolved greatly over time, and it was a late comer to the sacramental ministry and mission of the Church. I find that its record in the hands of the Church is, at best, ambivalent. At worst, it has had a corrupting influence and has been abused in numerous ways as a tool of control. For this reason, the Church remains in a state of recovery -- I hope with a strong dose of grace -- when it comes to our theologies of marriage.
As far as Christianity is concerned, baptism trumps gender. Indeed, the vocation of new life in the Risen Christ explodes the notion that biological and social distinctions are essential to God's work and blessing. Every human institution is subjugated to the saving grace of Christ and re-ordered as a result, not least of which is marriage. Paul in his letter to the Galatians makes perhaps the most succinct assertion of this critical theological point: ". . .there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." (3:28 -- NRSV)
With that in mind, I believe the Church ought to publicly affirm Christ's blessing on a couple (gender notwithstanding) and their shared household only after they have discerned with the body of the faithful that their covenant is an extension of their baptismal vocation. This is the function of a Christian marriage liturgy -- nothing more or less than that.
Christian marriage and Christian solitude are both mysteriously (and somewhat ironically) about building and nurturing Christian community. For this reason, the Church still has a great deal to learn from our monastic traditions about helping Christian adults discern the spiritual and practical dimensions of life-long vows, the very real call of single adulthood, and what it means in both cases to live with others in fruitful communion in Christ.
A word about procreation and marriage. . . Of course children, biological or adopted, benefit along with other family members, friends, and the broader community from the expanded, stable household generated by a healthy marriage. I love my son dearly, and I have learned that parenthood is just as much a vocation as marriage! However, I strongly disagree with the apparent position of Roman Catholicism and other more conservative theologies which continue to argue that biological procreation (or its potential, however improbable) forms an essential ingredient of a fulfilled marriage. To paraphrase the late Ed Friedman, good parents learn not to place the weight of their individual salvation (or the salvation of their marriage!) on their children. Essentializing procreation seems to me to have its roots in the worldly endeavors of perpetuating inheritance, preserving the institutional church through time, and building and sustaining other human institutions like the nation state. But this priority on procreation fundamentally distorts marriage as a sacramental icon for all human covenants and perpetuates a myth that has profound consequences for the human family and our companion creatures. Indeed, we have interpreted the command to be "fruitful and multiply" too narrowly at our own peril, our children's peril, and, as we are increasingly learning, the planet's peril.

I should add that I feel very fortunate to be in a part of the Church that has done extensive work on this subject already, and to be sharing ministry with friends and colleagues who have been on the forefront of the theological recovery in this area.

As a post script, Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire offers a strikingly personal and yet pastoral reflection on his ongoing work and ministry in an interview with the Church Times. Truly, he re-defines "grace under fire." Very much worth reading. . .

Preaching While Gay

2008-04-30T07:07:00.000-07:00

The Lead reports that Archbishop Rowan Williams has barred Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire from preaching or presiding while in England. Bishop Robinson has agreed to comply, although he submits to a moral travesty that should be an embarrassment to every Anglican.

Meanwhile, no similar measure has been taken against Archbishop Akinola or Presiding Bishop Venables, both of whom (amongst others) continue to actively violate provincial boundaries, snapping up clergy, parishes, and dioceses outside of their jurisdiction. All this continues despite protest from their peers. All this continues even though it flouts the Windsor Report, which was reportedly cited as another reason to bar Bishop Robinson from simply preaching and presiding. Yet, by all accounts, Akinola and Venables and their cohorts are still invited to Lambeth while Bishop Robinson is not.

The justification used to bar Bishop Robinson appears to me to be the moral ecclesiastical equivalent of "driving while black" -- preaching or presiding while gay. Truly, it smacks of Donatism. How can the greater world not draw the conclusion that his preaching or presiding is somehow perceived as diminished or less Spirit-filled -- less fruitful for the Church, in England at least -- simply because he is gay?

The primary reason Archbishop Williams appears to have given for this decision is to forestall further controversy in the Communion. I submit that this is a futile effort, exhibits no substantive leadership, and only further victimizes our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers. In the end, it constitutes only a demonstration of raw heterosexism: a prejudice against gays combined with an exercise in clerical power.

This marks another sad day in Anglican history and will do nothing to resolve the ongoing crisis.

Update: Tobias Haller has some graceful perspective on this day, and on Bishop Robinson's response, which is more graceful than many of our own.

Hearing Stephen's Cry

2008-04-23T13:23:00.000-07:00

A Reflection for Earth Day, 2008

Excerpted from a Sermon delivered at Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, on the Fifth Sunday of Easter

Easter 5 Lections

A mentor and good friend to me once remarked that he wasn’t an environmentalist. Charlie said he didn’t honestly care so much about the whale or the walrus, the polar bear or the eagle. But what he did care about was the human family and our need for clean air and clean water, for adequate food for all people, for health and well-being. Taking care of the whale and the walrus, the polar bear and the eagle, the farmland and the rain forest – all of this was good in as much as it meant good things for us.

I may care more about the natural world than Charlie did or does, but his observation holds true. We have forgotten in our daily habits and consumptive appetites that our common life and work depends on a 100-million-year-old ecosystem that is now under siege. The household of God, built by our Creator through almost unimaginable and miraculous processes spanning vast eons is the sacramental sign of the home with many dwelling places that Christ promises us in the Gospel. And we are placing it in peril on to imperil ourselves.

We have learned in recent months the close connection between policies on bio-fuels, industrialization, soaring oil and agricultural prices, and food riots in Haiti and sub-Saharan Africa. We struggle as a people with the fact that we cannot so easily engineer our way out of the dangers of global warming, increasingly scarce commodities, and famine for some of our sisters and brothers. These are huge problems. They require not only a complete top-to-bottom re-thinking of how we have lived and will live as a people, but a renewed solidarity and commitment from each of us in small, everyday decisions. We are re-learning what the bee and hummingbird both instinctively learn: balance in an inter-dependent cosmos.

Picking up the lid to a dumpster yesterday while we were at the beach on our youth retreat in Inverness, I glimpsed piles of plastic, discarded cardboard, scraps of paper carelessly tossed on the pristine sands of Northern California: an accusatory fingerprint of our forgetful appetites and ways that abuse the Earth.

Some Christians – indeed many through the centuries – argue that all Creation is fallen. That is among our hallowed traditions. But what even our most ardently theologically conservative sisters and brothers are now starting to see is that our abuse of the planet is a symptom of our fall. Our often unconscious and sometimes brazen insistence that the resources of the Earth are endlessly ours to be used as we see fit is eating our home – made by God – is eating it alive, tearing it apart brick by brick. We are dismantling God’s mortal mansion lovingly given for us. We are consuming our own body. And we are caught, so many of us, unknowingly in this system of quiet violence to our roots. Heaven help us if we pull the cornerstone!

I am increasingly alarmed by our ever more sleep-deprived and over-medicated culture, whatever claims it may make, consciously or not, to a Judeo-Christian heritage. I find myself more and more these days listening to Scripture and prayer alongside the wisdom of my gut as I trim back the ingested sugar and processed chemicals; the cleansing of simple water that marks our baptism; the wisdom of the wind in the trees like the breath of the Spirit; the heartbeat of Christ in the motion of the waves; and the sacramental generosity of self-giving love in the life of grain and the vine that we point to and then take in each Sunday. It is as though the Earth itself has taken up Stephen’s loving cry as he, the first Christian martyr, is stoned by the powerful and the heedless, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

For too long, we have rejected the earth as a resource for holiness. The linear-thinking ancestors who wrote our history were carrying the mantle of ancient and medieval empire when they, in the name of God’s kingdom made in their image, threw out pagan worldviews and practices wholesale: those traditions of indigenous peoples that, at their best, remembered that our relationship with the earth itself is inexorably caught up in our relationship with the divine. The people many of our ancestors were taught to hate now speak like ghosts to us across the ages through the creatures at the edge of extinction, the dying reefs, and the starved and parched earth, reminding us that we are accountable to the soil and the land and the spirit of the creature every bit as much as God is accountable to us the abundant love we receive in the harvest, the catch of the day, and the strike of raw materials.

Listen closely to the lives of many of our own neighbors who are not Christian. So many of the spiritual practices they take up quietly damn our Christian tradition – and rightly so – for its rejection of the body’s wisdom, the life that flows from being rooted in the Earth and her patient rhythms and all the dance of the Cosmos. Sometime between the first Christian martyr and the present day, we became the powerful and the heedless, stoning the body of Creation that saw the heavens opened and witnessed to us in ways too many to number.

What we have too often forgotten is that Jesus was born human, crucified, and rose again not only for our sake, but for the sake of all Creation. The heritage of his body, beyond that of the lineage of ancient Israel and King David, was the heritage of genetics and mitochondria, cells and organs, matter and energy woven into beautiful life, the heritage of the whale and the spider, the sky and the ocean, the stars and the galaxies. Stardust made green and verdant is who we are, too, every bit as much as our intelligence and industry. Jesus today promises his followers a mansion, a house with many rooms. The Earth, and indeed the universe, is a sacramental sign, however fallen, of this promised home for us. We break it at our peril and risk the curses of our children. Indeed, it is not too much to say that we risk a hideous damnation for our failure to heed the Gospel, the Word made flesh –flesh like our flesh, bonded to the life of all Creation.

Yet for all the doom and gloom, for a Creation profoundly threatened, there is reason to hope. The long-silenced cries of the Earth, echoing Stephen’s words, have at last gotten the attention of politicians and even the great leaders of industry, whose ambitions and machines gave birth to our economy and lifestyle. Scientists are back in the labs and the fields and the oceans trying to close the loops of our energy cycles. Indigenous practices are strangely winding their ways back into the hands of farmers who have grown tired of chemical fertilizers, poisoned wells, and tainted livestock. Fishermen are gladly putting their marginal livelihoods on the line to restore fish populations. And we as Christians are called to the table to remind us that these actions are not about mere survival, but about the Gospel, the working out of our salvation.

We are just starting to recover in our faith and practice a sense of the sacramental nature of God’s creation, a body that nourishes us and attends to us with the great cycles of warm and cold, rain and sun, the green and blue life whose DNA is at our roots like long lost relatives or the ancient, land-based tribal peoples from which we descended.

We are, in small but significant ways, starting to remember this as Celtic Christians did, invoking the name of the Trinity each time they dug their hands into the soil, tended the tree, or prepared the food. We are learning to remember it each time we think twice before buying the plastic, taking out the recycling, starting a compost, replacing a light-bulb, downsizing our consumption, calculating our carbon footprint, or pondering our gas mileage.

We must remember it as we learn to stand up in Christ’s name for justice not only for the suffering humanity around us but for the often silent cries of our forgotten neighbors – the creatures in all their diversity and plentitude, strangeness, and beauty that God also lovingly made. They share God’s house with us. In many ways, their welfare is our welfare. These are small steps, but cumulatively, they add up to a great deal, and they send a powerful message that we are waking up again to who we were made to be, and who we are called to become.

We must return to the fullness of our deepest traditions, with its cycle of seasons, our rhythms grounded in those of the earth, the sun, and the moon. For, in truth, we are both a cyclic and a linear people. Our brains are hardwired for both. The cyclic to nurture us on the journey and remind us of our heritage, the linear to set us free from bondage and unfold the divine gift of salvation among us.

We must learn again to pattern ourselves in closer harmony with the stuff from which we were made and that which sustains our earthly pilgrimage, to regain hearts for green and growing things and the life of the seas. To care for this fragile house with many rooms, a home that nourishes our earthly pilgrimage and bears the marks of the divine architect, sacramental reflections of the Spirit that breathes life out of nothingness.

And then to recognize we are one in Christ, not only with each other, but with all Creation, called to lead the earth in God’s praise, giving voice to every creature under heaven as we sing not only with our voices but in our bodies and relationships, “Holy, holy, holy!”

And, like Stephen, see the sky open and heaven revealed, to glimpse the divine dwelling places prepared for us and all life from the foundations of Creation.

Fruits, Nuts, and Christ

2008-02-19T11:35:00.000-08:00

A Reflection for the Second Sunday of Lent

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house. . .”

I have to wonder what Abram would have thought of this strange God asking him to leave behind all that was his identity. I have to wonder what conversation was like the evening after Abram made up his mind to go. How he told his wife Sarai that they were about to leave behind everything. . .and I mean everything. . .that they thought they were. So much so, as you might remember, even their names later change to Abraham and Sarah as they are re-made by God’s promises and the strange journey they are about to make. It seems at once a primordial story of our humanity – indeed, much of Genesis is written precisely with that in mind. For even now, countless centuries after the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Lot was told around campfires in the desert, we remain largely a nomadic people.

Even for those of us who have spent all or most of our lives living here in Mill Valley, we only have to look at the changes we see around us to recognize the entire human family remains on the move. The world is changing for good and for ill. People come into our lives and leave them. Many more of us seem to have stopped here as sojourners, visitors.

When I came out to the Bay Area from the Midwest nine years ago this Fall, I was reminded by one disgruntled family friend that I was coming out to be with all the “fruits and nuts.” I was moving to Berkeley, so what can I say? A parishioner in the small-town parish where I was raised up for ordination shrugged his shoulders and said California was going to all slide into the sea, anyway. Well, with the prognostication about Global Warming, maybe we will end up under water anyway – so perhaps Harold was right!

But I came anyway. I couldn’t exactly quantify what called me out here: The draw of a new experience in a diverse environment; a seminary that looked attractive to me; starting afresh in a new place with only my own mettle and a healthy dose of grace. Isn’t that why many people come West, as they have in this country for over a century and a half?

But there was no road map to follow when I got out here. To be sure, a seminary education had a set curriculum, but beyond those three years the future was as opaque and impenetrable to my gaze as a solid brick wall . . . or a completely fogged-in day on the Bay. I didn’t imagine I would meet Hiroko (although the general idea of meeting someone to marry was attractive.) I didn’t imagine working in San Francisco for four years in a small, struggling Asian-American mission. I couldn’t fathom having a son or even what he might look like. But Daniel looks and behaves like Daniel, despite his Dad’s lack of specific vision for the future. . . And I didn’t imagine ending up in Marin County in Mill Valley, with a loving parish like this one. Go figure!

“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes,” Jesus says to a puzzled Nicodemus today in yet another inscrutable passage from John’s Gospel. I can’t imagine that many of you have a story all that different from mine. Several weeks ago I asked our ten o’clock crowd how many of them imagined they would be living Mill Valley when they grew up. No one out of a hundred raised their hands. Every one of us lives a story that is being written as we live it. We are the “fruits” and “nuts” that grew on far away trees and ended up together in this place for a time, brought here by God into community, being turned inside out regularly by the challenges and joys of a life together shared.

Granted there are times even here in Mill Valley that it seems coming to church itself may be, well, a little bit nutty. And surely, even with our context set aside for a minute, with all that goes on in churches from time to time – Church of Our Saviour being no exception – we wonder why we stick with it.

Even more deeply we ought to feel on occasion why we stick with God in Christ. Jesus in John’s Gospel today speaks almost in riddles about the profound heart of Christian conversion in baptism. It is a mysterious event, buried for many of us in our infancy before we can remember. Even for those of us who can remember our baptisms, we are still left wondering why we did it at times. Why we turned ourselves over to this strange God and the tradition that has grown up in response. The Spirit blew like the wind, where it chose, and we heard the sound of it. . . or our parents and families did. . . but we did not know where it came from or where it was going. Perhaps, more appropriately for the story of Abram and his family: we did not know where it was taking us.

The Christian journey is like that. There are a few road signs, but no map. The path forward is obscured by everything from trees to mountains, cloud, and the fog of our own confusion, and frequently the darkness of our own limited knowledge. All we know much of the time is that we will meet companions along the way. They will walk with us for a time. At other times, we will be swept up by the wind and turned in a completely new direction on our own.

Our faith is built on the same assumptions that Abram’s was. This Abram who pulled up stakes and set off on a wild new adventure into the land of fruits and nuts, where people were strange and different, and the path forward was uncertain. His assumed faith, our faith, the faith of Christ and his disciples across the ages, the faith of a Spirit-filled people as she blows them into uncharted waters. . . it is a faith that assumes God knows what is right for us.

It is not blind allegiance to a set of principles or rules, but an abiding relationship with the One who made us. It will be contentious and difficult at times, much like a marriage. It will be frustrating and strange, like living in a foreign land. But it will remake us . . . for that is what journey is all about.

May you be re-made this Lent, here in the land of the fruits and nuts, where all bets are off, and the joyous task is only to follow where the wind blows, trusting that through it, our Savior is leading us to our true home and re-making us along the way.

Let the Reader Beware

2008-01-23T22:05:00.000-08:00

It's an old story, but the much maligned text, John 14:6, keeps resurfacing in various places in the realm of Anglican discourse -- too often in the hands of those who would hold The Episcopal Church as a whole and our Presiding Bishop in particular as somehow heretical or, in the words of one bishop, "deficient" in our Christology; that unless we take "No one comes to the Father except through me" in its most universalizing and exclusive meaning, we are not being faithful Christians.

I waded into a discussion about this at the HoB/D listserve earlier in the evening, after re-reading John 14 and the verses that come just before it.

In principle, context really matters in this case, even if we sidestep debate about what the "historical Jesus" said or didn't say, and confine ourselves fairly narrowly to the internal integrity of the Fourth Gospel.

Here's a more expanded version of what I posted to the list:

I am puzzled that conversations around John 14:6 often do not reflect more often that the verse is a direct response to Thomas's very pressing and somewhat personal question: "How can we know the Way?" The passion of the question seems to stem from an understandably fearful reaction to the foretelling of Peter's denial and Jesus' imminent death and departure.

The question posed also appears characteristic of Thomas, as he cuts through dense theological language to seek more tangible truths. The lead up to his encounter with the Risen Christ in John 20 is among the most well-known stories in the Fourth Gospel and serves as an expansion, if not the apex, of his seeking role.

Moreover, in chapter 14, Jesus is in conversation with his followers, not the unconverted. He is, even in the profoundly theological and sometimes other-worldly narrative of John, addressing a reasonably specific audience of disciples. And Jesus concludes his answer with verse 7, appearing to respond directly to Thomas not in a globalizing, but rather a personal sense: "If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him."

Taken in the broader context of John, this seems to be Christ speaking lovingly to the Johannine community of believers as they wrestle with doubts and their identity in a time of conflict. And, as so many have written (Bill Countryman's The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel is but one wonderful example), it is a statement more broadly given for Christians undergoing conversion, struggling with a journey of deepening faith -- a pilgrimage even -- through the sacramental life, moving into the tensions of a deeply personal and, at the same time, communal relationship with God in Christ.

To therefore use 14:6 in isolation as a litmus test for the orthodoxy of "believers" or an exclusive, narrow theological statement about how God's salvation works (through the Church only?), strikes me as bringing violence into an inspired text -- a passage, chapter 14, that seems intended to be more pastoral than polemical, and to bring comfort to a community of disciples in distress.

After all, it opens with these words, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. . ." (14:1)

Do we really dare, given this context, use it to trouble the hearts of others?

At the end of the day, John 14:6 comes alongside words that are fundamentally meant to edify the Christian community, to draw us into the holy mystery of Christ speaking through the gathering of the baptized around the eucharist, and to bring us along further together in the journey of discipleship.

Yes, it says Christ is central for us as Christians in our knowing God. But anything more universalizing or triumphalist than that may be presuming too much, and brings meaning to the text that I'm not sure is intended.

Such mis-use, as we have seen for too long of John 14:6, is a warning to all of us about proof-texting our own unarticulated agendas with scripture snippets stripped of context.

While I've said nothing really new here, it always bears repeating that scripture has been used for both good and ill by Christians over the centuries. We make spiritual, and indeed moral choices in how we interpret and use our holy texts.

Let the reader of the Word beware.

Blessing Righteousness

2008-01-13T21:32:00.000-08:00

Sermon delivered at Church of Our Saviour

Mill Valley, California
The First Sunday after Epiphany
The Baptism of Our Lord

January 13th, 2008

Audio will be posted soon.

Welcome to the other side of the holidays. Back into the thick of things we find ourselves, in the midst of a roaring storm last weekend (and I might add heroic efforts ranging from keeping vigil with the emergency generator to showing up and worshiping by candle light!) I’m actually a little sorry to have missed the great adventure here, but I was off with family in Texas seeing my brother married and starting off himself on a new great adventure.

Christmas to me seems like an age ago, how about you? It’s nestled somewhere between grand liturgies and harrowing hikes with a four-year-old through a vast concrete airport. Many of you are back at school, back at work, back to the usual routines with heightened pressures as the economy slows and the market tide rolls back for a time. Budgets have to be worked and re-worked, paperwork is looming as the tax forms arrive, jobs are starting to shift, which adds a whole new level of anxiety. Ballot instructions roll in for Super Tuesday, the airwaves are filled with pundits and politicians hard at it into the wee hours. The great Anglican mess rolls on with fresh news of the first inhibition of a schismatic bishop in a neighboring diocese, and half a world away, our sisters and brothers in uniform still risk their lives trying to bring order in troubled places. Back into the thick of things is the world and Church, the good, the bad, and the ugly. We must be nagged a bit as we are after every Christmas: did it really usher in a renewed righteousness in the world, or are we back where we were in late November, no better off with a Messiah than without one?

Regardless how we might answer that question, we are all agreed that we remain very much in a state of needing grace. We gather here this morning to seek blessing as we often do: a bit more grace, please, for our busy, sometimes harried lives, a breath of spiritual refreshment before plunging back into the work of tomorrow. We expect Christ’s arrival to mean our baptisms have finally “taken,” that we have a shot at breaking through the challenges of this life, a chance to at last relax and finally realize our longstanding hope that peace has finally come to our hearts, the Reign of God has at least arrived for us and our children.

In a way, so does John the Baptist in today’s Gospel.

It’s hard not to expect something a little bit more dramatic between John and Jesus at the River Jordan – something a little bit more dramatic than an esoteric conversation about the necessity of it all. In a curious way, we’ve been trying to get the two of them together for several weeks now. John’s conception is followed by a remarkable encounter between Mary and John’s mother, Elizabeth. John’s father, Zechariah, is struck dumb until the child is born. Jesus is born amidst the declarations of angels and the star and the magi appear. We have also sprung forward on occasion as decades later John appears at the Jordan River and foretells Christ’s coming, the light that the darkness cannot overcome, warning off those who expect an easy redemption with fiery words. We might capture a mental image of him now fully grown, wild-eyed, dressed in his odd animal skins, living on the edge.

In the snippet of the story we hear this morning, the two cousins, the teacher and disciple, must surely have met with something more than a simple discussion over who gets to do what in the River. Might the two have embraced like old friends, perhaps; might they have shed a tear as two spiritual firebrands compare notes about shaking up the towns and villages; perhaps they laugh about innocent childhoods lost to time and the challenges of mature adulthood with all of its risks of failure?

But no, Matthew only offers us the glimpse of a few brief words that remind us of what John sees in Jesus, and Jesus almost demands baptism “to fulfill all righteousness.” For us and for the earliest Christians a profound mystery is in the imperfect prophet baptizing the person we call the Son of God. John means it when he says he rather needs Jesus to baptize him. Like us, John recognizes that he’s the one who needs the grace.

But we are patiently reminded, as the Spirit waits to appear, that Christ’s Gospel reverses what we expect. For this is the Jesus who will wash his disciples’ feet and calm their quarrels with an admonition that the greatest will be the servant of all. This is the Jesus who will say strange things like the least is the greatest in the Kingdom of God, the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

This reversal of expectations is true even for John the Baptist, who has predicted the coming Messiah with a passion that rouses the crowds. His life is built around the hope of Christ’s appearing. But when Jesus emerges and utters his first words as a grown human being in the Gospel of Matthew, he upends the prophet’s world-view. As he will spend his ministry doing. To be clear, if Jesus were to suddenly appear here this morning, he might not seek to teach from the pulpit or administer communion. He might rather sit and listen among you. He might demand that we bless him.

And where would that leave us? Dumbstruck perhaps? Hesitant, for sure.

Fulfilling righteousness has little to do with our power to influence outcomes in our own lives or the lives of others, nor does it really have to do with acquiring some cosmic sense of our own failings. Most importantly, fulfilling righteousness may not have much to do at all with our craving God’s blessing. Instead, it has much more to do with the times when we seek out Christ in our midst and live into our deeper need to bless him in one another. Of setting aside our impatient desires long enough to allow God’s grace to act through us, to allow the action of the Spirit in our imperfect midst.

We cannot, through the vanity of our own efforts, grasp or attain righteousness. We can only bless righteousness, baptize it, fulfill it by serving the One who came to serve wherever we find him. It’s a potent message for us who strive continually to be better, to work to deserve God’s blessing. Like John standing at the River Jordan expecting Christ to winnow, burn the chaff, wash us with a spiritual fire, perfect us, we might be a little bit surprised at a Christ who says, “No, you baptize me. Bless me, you imperfect, beloved children of God. For only in this way will the righteous reign of God begin.”

So that is our task today as we move through our usual routine, renew our baptismal covenant, say the prayers, come forward to table and receive the cup and bread broken. We bless God in Christ and then risk repeating that action over and over again as we leave here to serve: to serve without being perfect or fully capable, or even fully equipped to handle the problems, challenges, and fears the world will bring us.

For our capabilities, busy-ness, resolve, politics, and problem-solving abilities are not at issue in today’s Gospel. Only God’s grace is. For righteousness fulfilled welcomes the Spirit, and perhaps when our clattering desires and impatient endeavors quiet for a moment, perhaps when we learn to bless Christ in our midst rather than anxiously await his blessing, the sky will open, the Spirit will descend, and we, too, will hear the voice of God proclaiming:

“This is my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Misapprehension

2008-01-13T20:05:00.000-08:00

It has already been widely discussed in the blogosphere that late on Friday, the Presiding Bishop inhibited John-David Schofield from functioning as bishop in the Episcopal Church. He has two months to recant abandonment of communion in this Church, or face a possible deposition by the House of Bishops.

Mark Harris and Tobias Haller sum up the situation with great insight. Much of the response, ranging from the Primate of the Southern Cone to Bishop Iker of Fort Worth states the obvious. Some of it, in my view, is just stuff and nonsense.

At the end of the day, it really matters very little what they say or think. What matters now is the internal integrity of the communion of the Episcopal Church, for that is the communion over which our canons have jurisdiction. John-David Schofield might equivocate and Presiding Bishop Venables may say we have no power over him. But now a process must be followed, with the quite possible end of declaring a see vacant so that the life of the communion of this church may continue, and those who remain Episcopalian, the true Diocese of San Joaquin duly formed by this Church through an act of General Convention, may claim what is rightly within their stewardship and jurisdiction.

And the integrity of communion matters, not because it is perfect, but because communion is about that root word, community, which means how we remain accountable to one another in the context of the greater body.

In this sense, it seems a clear boundary violation has occurred, and the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church is doing what good, differentiated leaders do when this happens: she is stewarding, along with our bishops in collegial relationship, the boundaries of this Church.

With this in mind, it seems to me a number of things are clear:

Whatever ontological identity John-David may claim as "bishop," no bishop, and no clergy for that matter, function in the Church without the consent of the body. As other bloggers have noted, we clergy all serve under license. That's how we are held accountable to the greater community that, through our overseers, ordained us and gave us standing in this communion. Even laity are accountable to the communities in which they serve. That is part of what it means to live in community.
Vows do matter, even when they are to the imperfect. John-David Schofield and a number of clergy who follow him may regard The Episcopal Church as heretical or disagree with its decisions, either recent or longstanding. They may, by moving to the Southern Cone, believe they are protecting their personal piety and perceived faithful integrity from whatever they believe we, as a Body, have done incorrectly. But that's not the issue. The issue is that they made ordination vows to the discipline, doctrine, and worship of this Church. And John-David in particular agreed to honor the boundaries of collegiality in the House of Bishops, and no other. To actively place himself, as bishop, under the jurisdiction of another House and Primate appears to me and many others to violate these vows, and means risking the privileges and responsibilities of ordination in this Church, including stewardship of any property that is held in trust for this Body in San Joaquin.
Accountability matters, as John-David is only likely to discover more profoundly in the coming months. If he ducks accountability for trying to grab at privileges and property he has already publicly forfeited, he could well force the only option then left to The Episcopal Church: court action.
In the context of this question, all the rest about human sexuality, Lambeth 1998.I.10, the consecration of the bishop of New Hampshire, and upholding the "faith once delivered to the saints," is simply a smoke-screen for bad behavior in community, a bucket full of red herrings. That is what I mean by stuff and nonsense.

Our Presiding Bishop has been succinct, direct, and collegial in her approach to this situation, a display of true leadership at a time when naked power and property grabs by bishops and archbishops risk making us all a laughingstock. It's a grim time, but there is something refreshing in leadership that draws clear boundaries and takes responsibility for consequences that are measured, in line with the internal integrity of this Church community, and shared in careful discernment.

So now John-David can claim martyrdom or superiority by numbers all he wants. It really doesn't matter.

While there is no place for us to impugn anything about his faith in Christ, the truth is, we are all accountable for our own behavior in community. We make decisions we hope out of a place of inner integrity and then accept the consequences with some humility. That's a simple matter of transparency and vulnerability in right relationship. It seems to me the Gospel has a great deal more to say about this than personal piety, doctrine, righteousness, or beliefs.

And it strikes me that a fundamental misapprehension about this is very much at work near the heart of the present mess.

Eves Dropping

2007-12-31T17:47:00.000-08:00

Late yesterday evening, I received an e-mail from Christopher, a deep-thinking theologian and friend, asking for reflections from those of us in the church who have children. He was interested in our response to a curious post, "on what is and what is possible" over at Thomas's Journal, suggesting that children ought to be better disciplined to attend late Christmas Eve services in the name of teaching them that Christianity "costs" something. Christopher's response is here.

Christopher generously urged me to post my thoughts, so I posted them to the thread under the original post, and here they are, in a more edited and expanded form:

Who is to pay the "cost" of attending late-night masses: the children who get bored and difficult, or the parents who force them to sit still through the midnight service?

While I tend to agree with Brother Tom's general idea (Christianity costs something) I disagree about where he directs this concern, particularly at children.

My son this year gave up two Sunday early afternoons to practice being a shepherd for our 4 p.m. Christmas Eve pageant. He learned more about the Christmas story and the joy and preparation that comes with it, I am sure, with other children, re-telling the story, and then sharing in Eucharist, than in only sitting. . . fatigued. . through a much later and less frenetic (for a four-year-old) Christmas Eve service.

This past Sunday, the "Low Sunday" after Christmas no less, a neighbor who recently began coming with her two children was smiling with delight following our 10 a.m. worship. She had e-mailed me about halfway through Advent asking if she might bring her children to join in the pageant rehearsals, already under way. I said, "Of course!" "

They've been back every regular worship since.

This morning, her 8-year-old showed me a drawing of people in worship with, "yay church!" written all over it. He was beaming ear to ear. I was stunned, as this was particularly surprising in a town, county, and region of the country that is known for its militant secularism.

He said he insists on coming every week now. His mother nodded and admitted her children are the driving reason she makes provision each Sunday for church.

I don't think it's always true that adults need to teach children about sacrificing to attend church. Quite the reverse may well also be true - perhaps more so!

More broadly, I am not entirely sure "cost" is appropriate as a theological premise or a spiritual discipline, particularly when it comes to joining actively in the worship and mission of the Body of Christ. I think it might be more compelling to argue that God's desire is that we give up mammon for grace, "bread and circuses" for the true bread which came down from heaven -- not because the "sacrifice" builds "character" -- but because the latter truly nourishes us and our neighbors as people made in the image of the Divine. Mammon, constructed as it can be upon violence and greed more often will leave us empty and alone, especially if it is central in our lives.

While I eschew church consumerism, if our people are bored or feel truly unfed or malnourished by "church," that is partly our responsibility as leaders. Grace is not being served. Uninspired, irrelevant, insipid, or age-inappropriate liturgy can be deadly to the spirit of the People of God. We do well to take this seriously; we do worse to wag our fingers when people, most of all our children, express boredom at it. I've written more on this in a slightly different context.

At Church of Our Saviour, we mix it up with Godly Play, a new fourth- and fifth- grade program called "Cloud of Witnesses," designed in large part by our Associate Rector, Este Gardner Cantor, a dynamic Middle School program, a Youth Group, and Adult forums, as well as our regular Rite I, Rite II, and Rite Something liturgies.

If people (from infants to adults) attend regularly, they get exposure to just about everything. Regardless of where they most feel at home worshipping and encountering God in our community, they hear proclaimed the transformative Gospel of Christ with an authentic passion. I believe that is what is key here, far and away from forcing tired children to sit still on one of the most exciting nights of the year.

The Tapestry of a Holy Night

2007-12-24T20:12:00.000-08:00

A Sermon for Christmas, 2007

Audio Available

Wherever I go
Far away and anywhere

Time after time you always shine
through dark of night calling after me

And wherever I climb
Far away and anywhere

You raise me high beyond the sky
through stormy night lifting me above

Venite Spiritu et emitte caelitus
Venite Spiritu et emitte caelitus
Venite Spiritu Venite Spiritus

Whenever I cry
Far away and anywhere

You hear me call when shadows fall
your light of hope showing me the way*

What is it that makes this night holy? Is it the beauty of our music and the way it resonates deeply with memory, pulling at those deep places in the soul? For me it is the way things shimmer, almost imperceptibly, but if we stop and look, pause and listen, we notice something sparkles. We turn on the Christmas lights at night, after all, and light the candles in the darkness as the solstice arrives.

The tapestry of life is laid open in the darkness. Time seems to suspend and then unroll like a taut spring releasing its tensions. We see our lives open and bare in profoundly sad and profoundly joyous ways. Some sort of lift happens inside, and we relate to strange – foreign even – stories about shepherds, angels, a peasant family, and a tiny child.

Luke’s Gospel tonight opens with an Emperor – Augustus. Like all great powers of this world, the Emperor speaks and the world responds. Joseph and Mary, no-names among a beleaguered and impoverished people, are swept up in this great response, Bethlehem is overflowing with visitors so there is no room at the inn, the great wave of military, economic, and legal power seems to overwhelm this tiny, insignificant family.

And yet, the Emperor is now forgotten, a temporal power who must have been resplendent in his day but who will pass into obscurity. We still toss his name around in our calendar, but how many of us recall the deeds of Augustus on a regular basis? How many of us can imagine his visage or encounter it on a daily basis? How many of us can name and date the crowning achievement of his reign, his most clever political machination? Even the empire he expanded and established is gone, lost to the winds of history and the inevitable passing of one human hubris to another. Even the peoples whose ancestors he subjugated have forgotten his power, his influence. “The yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor. . .” God has broken them utterly with the grind of time and an indomitable alternative for the human spirit – one that can be denied, but never eliminated.

No, this night, we know and say more about Mary, Joseph, and this little baby born in a backward village in ancient Judea than Caesar Augustus. Yes, you could argue I get paid to say that, but – well there’s more to it than that, surely! For you are all here tonight to recall the old story, perhaps hear it more deeply, revel in the music it has inspired, share it with your children perhaps, sing something that feels more a part of us than just about anything in our transient and fickle culture.

For the early Christian community, a small, pilgrim flock of people from every walk of life, there was something remarkable they recognized about Jesus. They called him “Christ,” “Messiah,” “Son of God.” They mined their sacred words for descriptions of him: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Even beyond their familiar scriptures, they saw in him the entire cosmos, the meaning of the human family, the essence of what it meant to have a purpose of compassionate living, a true holiness rooted in honest relationship, a thread running from the human heart directly into the bedrock of Creation, from our flesh, feelings, and thoughts rooted all of nature and whatever was behind it. They saw in him a path beyond death, a renewal of the entire way of being human, a self-giving love that dared real courage and integrity that seemed to come from beyond the self. And so they assigned him an almost legendary story of God come among us – legendary not because it is history or a-historical, but legendary because it describes something about a God beyond time who takes the whole universe and more and brings it down into a tiny, fragile child. And in doing so articulates an intimate connection between the divine and every galaxy, every planet, every person, every tiniest particle.

Christmas Eve is not about sentimentality, no matter how cynical our age becomes, no matter how digital or commoditized. We reckon something holy to this night, because this night calls something holy forth in each of us, even with all the stresses of this time of year. Many of us pause, whether with exhaustion or breathless anticipation, or both, on the edge of a hope that we can barely put into words.

It is that notion that there is a Love that watches over our lives, no matter how stained, imperfect, and strange they become. God calls after us, wherever we go. A love that molds the stardust into forms like us, so that we might gather in praise to something. . . Someone even, who defies comprehension. Love that seems to transcend death, as we are reminded by, at very least, our memories this time of year of those who have come before: holiday seasons long past, and memories of loved ones no longer with us – memories sometimes so palpable we’d swear they’re still with us. And we try to recreate that warmth we have known for ourselves, our own children, families, and friends.

A Child, tender, and fragile, is the light shining in the darkness. A light that cannot be overcome. The powerful can only wonder at powerlessness raised up to divine status. The arrogance of emperors, kings and princes, governors and elites, is suddenly seen for what it is in this single, solitary light.

A light, a Child who is the apple of Mary’s eye, as she gazes in wonder at the miraculous like any mother does, like any parent who gazes into a newborn’s eyes for the first time, a profound connection of flesh to flesh, bone to bone, an emotional bond that can be stretched and warped, but never quite completely severed.

Like God’s relationship with us. For no matter where we run, we encounter this holiness in our lives. We might shrink from it or ignore it, but it haunts us, and if we let it, it remakes us. For we were all like this little child at one time, tender, and fragile.

And the message for us this night is unequivocal: we are precious in God’s eyes. For God to embrace us in all of our imperfect and jumbled up genetics, our awkward limbs and oversized heads, our existential conflicts, our potential for acts of greatness as well as cowardice and even wickedness. . . well, what more loving act could God have than to become one of us? To remind us in our existential darkness that we are not alone. That we belong to God and one another, just as Jesus belongs to God and to Mary beyond words, to Joseph, too, who stands by watching in awe.

To the shepherds, as well, who are sweaty and smelly, outcasts as we are all outcasts somewhere, sweaty and smelly as we sometimes are, too. We are remarked upon by angels, watched over by a strange sense that we cannot quite shake: that we matter. We matter to Someone, somewhere, somehow, even beyond death.

Now, isn’t that worth singing about, gathering for, hoping for this time of year. . .and perhaps anytime?

For we are a Christmas people, re-born this time of year for renewal. . .that we may not pass without remark, no matter how short or long life lasts.

Wherever I go
Far away and anywhere

Time after time you always shine
through dark of night calling after me

And wherever I climb
Far away and anywhere

You raise me high beyond the sky
through stormy night lifting me above

Venite Spiritu et emitte caelitus
Venite Spiritu et emitte caelitus
Venite Spiritu Venite Spiritus

Whenever I cry
Far away and anywhere

You hear me call when shadows fall
your light of hope showing me the way*

Amen.

_______________________
* Libera: Far Away

A New Generation of Hope

2007-12-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

Jasper Goldberg, a senior at Tam High School and a faithful member of the parish where I serve, has penned a wonderful and bold essay, which was posted over at Bishop Marc's blog.

An excerpt:

We see in the stories of Jesus’ ministries to the prisoners, the lepers and the outcasts of society in his day a message that no one is below the love of God. We are all God’s children, and we know that what we do unto the least of the people of God, we do unto God. Every time that we allow an injustice to be perpetrated against a gay man or a lesbian woman, the marginalized of today’s world, we allow the attacker to harm our beloved God, and in our negligence we are guilty. It is not enough to stand on the sidelines, and hope that someday things will be better. We must make our stand for those that society considers “outcasts” if we are to be worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The future of the Church is in good hands.

Read the rest.

Under Orders

2007-12-12T09:43:00.000-08:00

The fray over the late decision of the Diocese of San Joaquin and their (erstwhile?) bishop, John-David Schofield, speaks largely for itself. I commend Tobias Haller's pithy essay as a suitable summary.

Where I have been drawn to reflect involves a very simple question: To whom are John-David Schofield and his clergy now accountable?

It might be easy to say, especially amongst our self-proclaimed reasserter sisters and brothers, Jesus Christ, of course! To me that is a given for anyone who embraces the title "Christian."

But that's not what I mean by accountability. I mean rather accountability in community. To illustrate, if it comes down to a choice between my faith in Jesus Christ and my accountability as an ordained priest to the Church I serve, I renounce my orders in that Church. Pure and simple.

In this way, honor has been served to a greater degree by those who cannot abide the recent decisions of The Episcopal Church and have therefore renounced their orders. Honor has also been served by those who disagree with the decisions of the greater Church but remain in communion, that is, in community, submitting to a level of mutual accountability that is honorable in at least two ways: to the integrity of their own theological positions and beliefs, and to the integrity of the Body of Christ -- the Church.

Do you disagree? Welcome to community.

John-David Schofield is one, but by no means the only bishop who seems to want to have it both ways: to withdraw and impugn the integrity of the Church to whom he has given vows of discipline, while at the same time not be held accountable to it.

This is a fundamental lesson about being "under orders," or taking vows. In the language of covenanted relationship it is the potentially fruitful agreement that engages conflict honestly while keeping the convenience of withdrawal and the extremes of divorce, abuse, and violence all off the table.

When John-David and a number of other bishops at the center of the current conflict withdrew from the House of Bishops, they violated the spirit, if not the letter, of their vows. Every clergy person makes a commitment to show up and be counted in a collegial body of shared ministry and leadership: oversight most particularly for bishops, pastoral duties particularly for priests, servanthood particularly for deacons -- and all three to some extent shared between these orders and among the laity. Our canons, discipline, and tradition make these relationships mutually, and to some degree, hierarchically accountable. We are all under orders, acknowledging the authority of another in our decision-making, even when we don't like it.

If for no other reason, this structure -- this polity -- is provided so that we do not assume the arrogance of conflating our views with those of God.

Withdrawing and retaining the privileges and powers of office amounts therefore to hubris, plain and simple. This point about the case of San Joaquin was made to me this past Sunday by none other than a Roman Catholic priest.

Now that San Joaquin has done the impossible and seceded from The Episcopal Church, will it endeavor to bring its canonical structure in line with that of the Southern Cone, its protector apparent? And to whom is John-David Schofield accountable in the event his clergy, parishes, or missions wish to make appeals about his leadership or decisions? What is to stop him from suspending the canons of his own diocese as he sees fit? And if it is a divine gift of benevolence that prevents him from doing so, what will prevent his inevitable successor from wielding autocratic power over a "diocese" that has apparently decided to chart its own course -- a course divorced from any real accountability to a provincial body?

These questions are probably more theoretical than practical. Deposition and litigation are the next steps in this train wreck, and the process is likely already under way. They may well make this whole reflection moot. I pray that may be sooner rather than later.

Even so, many of us seek ways to pastorally support the people of the congregations who have decided to remain part of The Episcopal Church. It is an ugly time now, and potentially uglier ahead.

But, keeping to the context of this essay, I want to know to whom John-David Schofield and the clergy who have followed him are most beholden at present. If indeed, as he wrote in his latest missive to the Presiding Bishop, he and his diocese can choose to return to The Episcopal Church if we "repent" to his satisfaction, what sort of authority does Presiding Bishop Venables (their new "Father in God") or the governance of the Southern Cone Province really wield in John-David's mind?

In short, to whom amongst the imperfect temporal powers of the Anglican Communion, however divinely inspired, is John-David truly accountable?

The Windsor Mess

2007-11-23T20:32:00.000-08:00

I had to laugh at the report just released by the ACC and the Primates on their response to the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops meeting in New Orleans. With its pie charts and graphs on agreement and disagreement, the report looks like a straw poll from Iowa. And if anyone thought the Anglican Communion was leaning one way or another, what the report clarifies is that what we have before us is really a mess of opinion. . .a Windsor Mess. . . A Communion wrestling with discernment, with a few vainly hoping for autocracy or a non-existent magisterium to enforce it, and many shrugging their shoulders or delaying their response and getting on with it.

Maybe that's what we really need -- more Christians simply getting on with it. That "it" that we call the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

While the Southern Cone's telescoping arms try to take advantage of disgruntled bishops and their cadre of clergy and Bishop Duncan's "sheep," a few diocesan conventions articulate more what and whom they're against than for, and Truro and company duke it out with the Diocese of Virginia and The Episcopal Church through lawyers in the courts, the rest of us prepare for Advent and a world that was just as messy in welcoming Christ -- or not -- as ours is.

The Windsor Mess is an Anglican Mess. A mess, on this day or two after Thanksgiving in the United States, I'm thankful for, quite frankly. I would be more disturbed by a clear decision about how "we" acquiesced to a process that was inflicted more than invited, artificial more than incarnational, and more punitive than palliative. . .not to mention reconciling.

Anglicanism has never been but messy, after all.

It's clear now that the Windsor Report and Process, long may their vaunted names fade in Anglican memory, solve nothing. Nor do I believe they should. Most of the Communion remains just that, in communion -- community with all of its proverbial messiness and lack of clarity. Community and communion where disagreement with a healthy degree of mutual accountability -- not authoritarianism -- is how we seek deeper truth and are taught to refrain from assuming divine judgment that was never ours to begin with.

Because there is only one clarity for Christians, and that is the grace found in God in Christ. The rest is the sorting of the grain and the tares. And that's God's job in the end, not ours. Those who wish clearer paths and definitions are leaving. May blessings go with them. I think they will find their destinations just as confusing and murky. Clarity is an elusive idol, after all, especially when it comes to ultimate truths.

I prefer the honesty of the mess, and the love of God that breaks through it anyway, especially in the local and the tangible, where the faces are real, lives are transformed, and the experiences of God in our midst reach the very depths of the heart.

Father Jake offers his take with loads of commentary.

Judgment for Stepping into It

2007-11-23T18:45:00.000-08:00

Sermon delivered at Church of Our Saviour,

Mill Valley, California
on the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

November 18th, 2007

Readings for Proper 28

So after hearing an apocalyptic gospel like that, I have to wonder, are we Christians a bit crazy? It’s not the sort of text that would have all of Mill Valley clamoring to get in our doors, is it?

The people who selected today’s lectionary are not here this morning to argue what reasoning they had when they clipped this passage out of Luke for our reflection. So an unanswered question this week that stuck with me following our Wednesday Bible dialogue: why is the historical context of this passage eliminated? Does it suggest that apocalypse is for all time? Or does placing it in its proper place in world history make it somehow less. . . or more true. . . than we might want in all of our very human complex of denial?

The verse that immediately follows the conclusion of this morning’s Gospel reading is this: “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near.” There you have it: apocalypse now for the first-century Christian community that Luke was writing for. The sack of Jerusalem, 70 A.D., stands at the beginning of our spiritual tradition and marks a dividing line for Judeo-Christian history that cannot be overstated. Beyond it, looking backwards, is an obscure time from which few texts contemporary with Jesus and his earliest followers survive. Scholars and theologians across the board agree that our knowledge of our deepest roots as a Christian people is scarred irrevocably by the sack of Jerusalem.

But back to the contemporary day, and starting with the Church. . . since All Hallow’s Eve, a bishop of the Episcopal Church has been inhibited while unspeakably awful charges are prepared for consideration in ecclesiastical court, other bishops have been warned about leading their dioceses into schism, which has led to a melee of public sniping; and in Fairfax, Virginia, the largest property dispute in the history of our Church began in open civil court. At question is the disposition of assets held by eleven parishes that have members who have voted to leave the Episcopal Church to become part of the Church of Nigeria.

When nothing else can be reconciled, we turn to the measurable, quantifiable, and tangible and try to protect the interests of those who wish to remain part of the historic Church. There is nothing else, it seems, left to be won. Indeed at times it is easier to leave than keep the vows and stand face-to-face with perceived heresies or perceived enemies. The only question now seems to be about who and what we can take with us if we decide to go.

A few bishops bent on leading their dioceses out of the Episcopal Church appealed in recent days to the history of the Church during the Civil War as precedence for their actions. But step back with me for a moment from considering the historical accuracy or lack of same in that comparison. Just ask what the comparison itself says about where we are in the sad thick of things: a “church at war,” indeed. Underscoring this was an e-mail I received this morning (from the HoB/D list) that said armed guards were at hand for the Convention Eucharist held yesterday in the Diocese of Fort Worth.

On September 5th, your Vestry elected me Rector. Overwhelmed as I have been with the blessedly more mundane and indeed joyous occasions both past and upcoming here at Church of Our Saviour, I paused to catch my breath while it seems all hell broke loose in the wider church. In one sense it’s a great blessing to be here in a parish that is showing many signs of strength and growth. In another, it’s tempting to feel a bit bewildered as those of us who have stepped into this body we call the Episcopal Church gather this season at the edge of broader chaos. In a profound way, our Jerusalem is burning, too, and no one’s quite sure what will rise from the ashes – a bit of ecclesiastical apocalypse for us, one that I feel somehow Christ and the early Christian community would understand. Given what they lived through, perhaps they would chide us for our hand-wringing in the present hour. . . hand-wringing over a few bishops and dioceses.

Hiroko and I took advantage of a friend’s visit this week and her willingness to look after Daniel for a few hours to go see Lions for Lambs, the new Robert Redford social and political commentary. The film was beat out at the box office last weekend by Bee Movie, a sarcastic and true-to-form Jerry Seinfeld animated comedy.

A lot of critics panned Lions for Lambs. “Backbendingly liberal,” one remarked, reducing the film to a fanatically partisan caricature. I suppose we could argue whether or not that was deserved, but that’s not really the point of my sermon today. Another opined, as I understand it, that the film left too many open ends in its plot and settles nothing. Well, I think after seeing it myself, So what? Isn’t that where we are right now as a nation and world: unsettled. . . at loose ends?

In Lions for Lambs, a jaded political science professor confronts one of his brightest students about to go over the edge into a life of comfortable apathy: frat-parties, a C average, and eventually a good paying job to subsidize the Benz or what-have-you. . .he confronts his student with the brutal apocalyptic truth of our age: “Rome is burning. . .while we fiddle around it.” Yep, it’s apocalyptic stuff all right, and it steps into it without apology. Liberal or conservative or neither, it’s meant to grab our attention. It speaks to the heart of our contemporary apocalypse.

Bee Movie is about a bee who flies out into the world and kind of, but not really, falls for a human being, and rakes in the dough – er, honey. But when I took my own four-year-old to see it, he turned to me about halfway through and asked to go home. So I don’t know how it ended. Not that I need to. Daniel doesn’t either. But Seinfeld and DreamWorks made the big bucks last weekend and won some critical praise for their unerring unwillingness to step into it – for being so wittily harmless that it even turned off my four-year-old. And that’s saying something.

One critic said children would enjoy the film’s “eye-popping colors” while adults would enjoy the Seinfeld humor. Mine didn’t, and I didn’t, quite honestly. And I wonder what it says about our culture and national community that this movie made the big bucks while serious, provocative commentary on the pressing moral questions of our time gets a scathing pass.

Boy, Jesus can be scary sometimes. His sort of film isn’t Bee Movie, either, it seems to me. He doesn’t avoid the painful questions, nor does he promise protection from the precipice we see all around. Life itself teaches that we are not necessarily shielded from those calamities that we hope, like the author of Isaiah, will pass over us or our children. We are called to look into the heart of our worst fears with truth. Yes, to see Jerusalem and Rome burning in awful technicolor, close up with surround sound pipelined at broadband speed, and yet we are called to adamantly refuse to lose heart.

Jesus says to us today that all of this conflict and strife will come to pass. It’s bound to sooner or later. We live all the time on the edge of a burning city, often metaphorical, sometimes literal. We Christians are children of apocalypse. We step into it with our baptism. Jesus Christ, in a profound way, was born into it. He died by its hand. He rose again into it.

God stepped into it with a judgment so profound it cannot be encapsulated in words, but we live into it each time we approach the altar with outstretched hands and call a scant mouthful of bread Life and a sip of ho-hum table wine Grace. And then we turn around and call ourselves the Body of Christ and step back into the apocalypse. We face death, disagreement, and division again and again, trusting that somehow we will rise to new and more abundant life. Hoping against hope. Refusing to bury our heads in the sand or give up the enterprise of seeking truth for ourselves and others even when it’s muddy, gray, and elusive. We sing “Alleluia” at death and swear on a cross that stands for God in our midst. We pray in the face of all the calamity that life and the universe sets before us and shout “Hosanna!” to a Person who predicted times of destruction for us.

Are we crazy? You tell me. This is not the stuff of altar calls, really. Indeed, it doesn’t have the general populace of Mill Valley hammering down our doors. It doesn’t inspire us to break out our wallets and fork it over, thinking we’re buying our safety or safety for our children. It makes the critics scoff that we are intractably liberal or conservative or both at the same time. It makes the artists and comics spout age-old cynicism about the Church.

Maybe all this talk about schism and war is all too “out there” for you this week. Maybe the only conflict you’re willing and able to engage this week is the arrival of relatives and old, well-worn family and personal dynamics working their way around the Thanksgiving turkey. So be it. “Good,” as my spiritual director often says quite simply, when I announce I’m in crisis mode. Do the work of the Gospel there – remember the call to love self and neighbor as the old and familiar emotional wars erupt. Take the hits and the hopes with a dash of equanimity. Laugh when you remember that Jesus told you that conflict both inner and intra was bound to happen and look for the wisdom he promises you in today’s Gospel. And remember Jesus' counsel not to prepare your defense in advance!

Rome is burning. Jerusalem is burning. At home and abroad. Step into it. Our Savior says, “So what?” I am here, he says. I will provide wisdom, he promises. You will be hauled up and hated.

Yeah, says our God, I get it. Me, too!

Just the same, come to table, all, and eat. Hold your heads up. Keep the hope alive as sung in the poetry of Isaiah. The ancient poetry about lambs and lions living peaceably together, not one sacrificed for the other. Avoid the apathetic idleness Paul warns the tender church in Thessalonica against; the apathetic idleness that a sometimes arrogant and often controversial figure (someone not terribly unlike Paul) warns the up and coming generation against. Work indeed, as though it all depends on you. Pray like heaven and hell together that it all depends on God in Christ Jesus. Laugh and poke fun at our silly and vapid ways like Seinfeld. And find the breath of the Spirit in our midst, dancing the dance of rebirth and resurrection. And let’s all hang in there together even when we strenuously disagree, singing songs for brighter days ahead: the hope we will seek together in Advent. And the strength that is given us as a people of faith; given not for ourselves alone, but to share with one another and a world in need.

Faces of Compassion

2007-09-25T16:23:00.001-07:00

For freedom for tyrrany, injustice, and poverty.

Buddhist monks remind us all of the power of non-violence.

May they be blessed with all that they hope for.

from the Mad Priest by way of Preludium

Leaning on B033

2007-09-25T16:23:00.000-07:00

So the House of Bishops has released a concise, clear statement, to the broader Church.

Yet it only clarifies that we remain very much with one foot in the closet, and the other out of it.

I concede, at least from a political angle, it is probably all our bishops could do at this point without over-stepping the bounds of their limited authority. The moratoria the Primates called for in their February Communiqué demanded almost draconian action of our episcopacy, a virtual running over of the laity and clergy in a number of dioceses without reference to their view or input. In short, the bishops were being asked to stop any legislation or decisions moving through General Convention and other authoritative bodies that would open the door of the episcopacy or authorized rites to our LGBT brothers and sisters. . . and for an indefinite period, as there is no timeline for the Anglican Communion reaching "consensus" on these matters.

Could they have done it? In theory, yes. Some would say they should have. Unless you are a stranger to this blog, you will know I'm very glad they didn't. Beyond the dreadful face it would have turned to some of our sisters and brothers in Christ, I think it would have spelt pastoral suicide for some bishops in their home dioceses and made heroes out of others. And finally it would have ultimately undermined the spirit of governance in this Church -- and I mean the Spirit being able to work freely across and through all four orders without bishops dictating terms and arrogating to themselves a great deal of power.

Fair enough.

But the other side of this statement is sorry in its own right, for the simple reason that the House of Bishops has staked our continued participation in the Anglican Communion on Resolution B033 from General Convention 2006, a piece of legislation that was pushed through in a tired moment and left many deputies (and some bishops) in frustrated, conflicted tears: hardly a reflection of prayerful contemplation and discernment. As friend, colleague, and General Convention deputy John Kirkley describes, it was the outcome of an "exercise in spiritual violence."

But then, B033 perhaps reflects the general state of the Communion at the present time -- where compromises over the manifesting issues come with gritted teeth and grumbling.

Because, at the end of the day, we are wrestling with a series of fundamental yes or no questions, which Anglicans, historically, don't always handle that well.

These include:

Do lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and trans-gendered persons deserve to be treated with full dignity in Christian community?
Are their committed relationships with others of the same gender blessed by God?

To these questions, our House of Bishops answered, in effect, a reserved "no," though I know many of them scarcely agree. They conceded to limit themselves to the boundaries of B033, hemming in their actions within the sorry and somewhat strange place our last General Convention left matters. . .all in the name of unity.

So, for that reason, I am saddened by what our bishops wrought. Especially for our LGBT sisters and brothers, including my colleagues in ministry who must continue wading through the gray of uncertainty as to whether or not they are fully welcomed as baptized members of this Church.

Despite the clear call "for unequivocal and active commitment to the civil rights, safety, and dignity of gay and lesbian persons," we refuse to embody this as a Church.

This is how systemic "-isms" work, including racism, sexism, and heterosexism. Promise all that is good and deliver. . .well. . .porridge.

It is my heartfelt prayer that our bishops will take up the "pastoral duty" they cite in this statement with enormous care. Pastoral duty and careful, sometimes painful conversation, will be the fare of the coming days in many places -- probably both in "conservative" dioceses where full accession to the Primates' Communiqué was desired, and in more "liberal" ones, not least of which is Chicago, where one nominee for bishop now has good reason to question whether it's worth the terrible media scrutiny she's already endured.

Betrayal is, in the best of circumstances, a terribly bitter pill to swallow.

God have mercy on all of us, and may we find tender places in our hearts for one another in the coming days.

Finally, the question remains whether B033, a flimsy and suspect piece of legislation, will be enough for our bishops to shield the integrity of the Body against our harshest detractors and help maintain the unity of the Communion.

In my view, probably not.

And just as well.

After all, God is "our strength and our shield," and a "very present help in trouble."

Christ is the ultimate source of our unity when it is threatened.

With all respect to our bishops, and my best prayers, B033 is most certainly not.

See more commentary over at The Lead.

Jared Cramer offers a more optimistic appraisal at Scribere Orare Est.

Episcopal Café is tracking news articles and other reactions here and here and here.

Tobias Haller offers up his usually profound insight.

Virtual Bishops

2007-09-22T18:39:00.000-07:00

Our bishops gathered today not to debate the latest conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury or our future disposition with the Anglican Communion, but to help, with their own imperfect hands, re-build a still Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast.

Meanwhile, a handful flew to Pittsburgh to continue plotting the usurpation, if not complete demise of our "lost" Church. It apparently wasn't worth their time or effort to stay present with the House of Bishops and engage in the hard conversation of what kind of statement the House will offer the Church next Tuesday...or even just submit a humble hand to recovery efforts in New Orleans. Perhaps they have made plans to help in other ways instead. I hope so.

Tomorrow, Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria stands up in Wheaton, Illinois, apparently to speak to those sympathetic with his clear view that we are a raving bunch of heretics and need a Christian revival. He flew to his destination without any hello in New Orleans, and, it seems, not even a single word to the Bishop of the Diocese of Chicago.

Heretics are easiest to cope with when they're virtual, after all. Then they are conveniently encapsulated in sound bites or, worse, locked in the hell of our bitter imaginations.

And framing all of this for me today is a marvelous piece from the Church Times by Giles Fraser, where he writes in part:

Call me old-fashioned, but I think the diocese is necessarily a geographical unit. It is geographical because communities are necessarily geographical. It may be the web that is responsible for the idea of non-geographical communities. On the web, I can be a member of a discussion group for dachshund-lovers, Star Wars fanatics, or like-minded Christians. But these are virtual communities, not real ones.

Now I'm a techie, no doubt about it. I enjoy (too much, my beloved Hiroko would remind me) blogging, Facebook, RSS, HTML, and podcasting. But this is all meant to support something else -- a real, fleshy, incarnational community that we call The Body of Christ. It has a place. It has a culture and local color. It has foibles, mistakes, tragedies, joys, sorrows, and challenges. But it is real people engaging with a real God on a journey towards a destination more real than even the reality of our blood and bones.

Dear Mr. Fraser: I'm old-fashioned, too.

Giles Fraser is right. A lot going on in the Anglican Communion these days is in someone's head or ephemeral bits and bytes set to disappear when a plug is pulled. Too much, I'd say. And it's not always rooted in what's real, what's incarnational.

The other attractive thing about a virtual reality is that we can walk away at any time with impunity. It's safe for us. Maybe the luxury of having what Giles Fraser calls a "virtual bishop" is precisely that. We can batton down the hatches and preserve a world view that feels safe and non-threatening. We can swap out a bishop or our allegiances like swapping a CD, a browser window, or changing our home page. Okay, so it's a bit more involved than that, but at least we can work to a place where we don't have to deal with any undesirable differences, or if one comes our way, we can always hit the off switch or its moral equivalent:

We're leavin'.

And as we all know in the blogosphere, I can always write or say things in a virtual church that I couldn't say or write if I were facing a real human being, a breathing person made in the Image of God, with nothing between us but air and the charity not to throw punches, metaphorical or otherwise.

In the final analysis, our bishops were brilliant -- and I mean that -- to invite Rowan Williams for a face-to-face, in-the-flesh meeting. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the meeting, the language of the Archbishop of Canterbury before the press yesterday was conciliatory -- even hopeful.

Maybe next time, they should invite Archbishop Peter Akinola to come. But then, the way he talks and if he remains true to form, he would probably decline the invitation. Should we wonder why?

The problem is that while our detractors keep us virtual, they remain virtual to us as well. Someone(s) at some point, on one side or the other, will have to break this pattern, before Christ can fully reconcile the real, incarnational, fleshy, crucified and risen center of our fragile and fractious Communion.

Heartfelt Truth

2007-09-21T12:32:00.000-07:00

Bishop Marc's September 20th statement to the House of Bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and visitors:

Most Reverend Sir, Honored Guests from the Communion,

I am Marc Andrus, Bishop of the Diocese of California. I have been given the grace of serving a diocese that encompasses enormous diversity, both in what we call the natural environment, and also in what we might call human ecology. I grew up in the American South where to my consciousness human diversity was cast in terms of Black and White.

In the California Bay Area the societal parameters for inclusion, outside even the concerns of the Church, are wide ranging: gender, ethnicity, economic, and sexual orientation. All of these parameters have received intense attention in the civil society, and have also been the concerns of the Episcopal Church in the Bay Area.

With respect to sexual orientation, it must be said that the Episcopal Church is the main refuge for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people who are seeking to lead a Christian life. These people are primarily not natives of the Bay Area, they come from all over the United States and indeed the world. They have come to San Francisco and the Bay Area seeking a life where they are not subjected to discrimination and violence, where they can lead normal lives, and in some cases, Christian lives. It is my responsibility to provide a context for this search for holiness of life.

It is also important to say here that the Episcopal Church in the Bay Area is immeasurably enriched by the presence of LGBT people in our parishes and missions. These are gifted, faithful Christian people, lay and ordained, passionate about their faith and church. It is hard to imagine what the Diocese of California would be like without these great people, but I can get something of a picture by remembering the many places I’ve lived from which they have come to the Bay Area, places where they were barred from employment, pushed out of their homes and families, and yes, found cold welcome in churches, and tragically in some instances, were subjected to physical violence. For every one of these men and women enlivening the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of California there are empty places all over the United States where their graceful presences are missing.

This is also true for me regarding Gene Robinson. He has helped this body of bishops of the Church with intelligence, passion, humility and great courage over the past four years, and I know he has served his diocese in the same manner. I hope, simply, that there will not be a Gene-shaped space at the Lambeth Conference where the living child of God Gene should be.

News and Blogging of the Day:
Our beloved Grandmère Mimi reflects on her impressions of the opening HoB Eucharist.

Rowan Cantuar roundly rejects any notion that September 30th is the deadline for an "ultimatum" and closes with a hopeful note.

The Church of Wales defers on the draft Anglican Covenant, not ready to accept it in its present form.

Mark Harris reflects briefly on the "frustration" of the Network bishops leaving the House of Bishops meeting before the dust behind the Archbishop of Canterbury's carriage settles.

and Bishop Kirk Smith of Arizona offers his perspective on the meeting thus far.

Bishops' Menu - Updated

2007-09-20T10:40:00.000-07:00

I like making lists.

Here's an index of articles arranged by the primary topical matters that our Bishops will be engaging with the Archbishop of Canterbury beginning Thursday. I'll be updating this as more is posted around the blogosphere.

No predicitions to be found here. Just hopes, news, and opinion. I try to take Jim Naughton's advice seriously!

Update: Walking with Integrity has writers attending the House of Bishops Meeting and offers up-to-minute posts and information.

The Anglican Covenant

The Archbishop of Wales raises serious concerns about the draft in its present form.
Our own Bishop Marc has outlined his concerns as well.
A group of five bishops have offered the House a 98-page report, which concludes:
The Anglican Communion already enjoys a Constitution that has served us well. The novel idea of a Covenant is out of order unless the Anglican Constitution is employed and properly amended or replaced. The fundamental issue in the current conflict, the most important and lasting reality, is not the matter of theological innovation, but the proposals and actions that would revolutionize the Anglican Constitution.

Human Sexuality and the Primates' Recommendations

Jim Naughton has offered an important overview and analysis of the situation.
Friend and colleague John Kirkley responds to Jim's thoughts.
Sister Joan Chittister has brought her Benedictine eyes to the situation.
It's generally understood that our Presiding Bishop is bringing a counter-proposal for the Primates' scheme for alternative oversight to the HoB meeting. Episcopal Life Online reports today that eight bishops have agreed to serve as "episcopal visitors" in lieu of the Presiding Bishop, in dioceses that requested alternative oversight. Fr. Jake offers a first take. The story accompanied with commentary is also over at The Lead.
The Lead posts that, according to local news reports, Bishop Jenkins of Louisiana and ten others will bring a resolution to the House of Bishop's meeting calling for assent to the recommendations of the Primates. John Kirkley questions the reasoning behind Bishop Jenkins' published arguments for this position over at meditatio.
Since this item is getting the most focus in the press, I'll post a link here to epiScope: House of Bishops Day One, which is tracking articles as they are published.

Communion, Schism, and Loyal Dissent

Bishop Duncan Gray writes about being a Windsor Bishop and remaining part of the Episcopal Church.
From The Guardian, Andrew Brown links, in a rather dark piece, Rowan Williams' recent work on a book about Dostoevsky with the present situation in the Anglican Communion.
At the evangelical Anglican website, Fulcrum, Graham Kings has this piece looking at the situation through the words of classical Anglican theologians. Intense commentary is ongoing.
And for my two cents, I argue over at Daily Episcopalian that a major task of leadership for our bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury at this meeting is to keep the present controversy in proper perspective.

Prayers be with all of them in the ensuing hours.

I have updated the Anglican/Episcopal timeline here to reflect recent events.

The Deep Breath

2007-09-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

...before the plunge.

So the House of Bishops meets next Thursday, September 20th, and the Global South merrily continues to consecrate bishops for their missionary bodies in North America. Leaders of the Episcopal Dioceses of Pittburgh, Fort Worth, San Joaquin, and Quincy, are now all in various stages of planning to divorce themselves from The Episcopal Church. The effort seems afoot to attach as much weight as possible to the HoB response to the Primates this month. It's a shrewd, albeit classic political ploy, because it allows the Network and the Global South band to blame the HoB, and perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury as well, for whatever endeavor they have set their hearts on -- even schism. Whether it's deeply honest or not in the light of Christ is quite another question entirely. And many of the tangible repercussions are sadly ending up thrown to the secular courts, where they will play out in costly ways for years to come.

Here are some links for gaining perspective on the present situation:

An advisor to the Archbishop of Canterbury's office has declared that the Primates' Dar Es Salaam Communiqué does not represent an ultimatum to The Episcopal Church. I disagree to some extent, as the language seems very much like a veiled threat or demand. . . but of course without any real teeth. The Primates in particular have no authority by themselves to enforce any policy internally in The Episcopal Church or even see us trotted out of the Communion.

My quibble aside, it seems clear at any rate that the Archbishop of Canterbury has no intention of arriving in New Orleans bringing threats of excommunication, let alone hell-fire and damnation. And it does me well to grant that the Archbishop of Canterbury was at Dar Es Salaam in February and I wasn't!

So September 30th is not D-day, although some would wish it so. Ironically, the "invasion" has already begun. Indeed, it is well under way.

If you ask me, the schismatic dioceses and their allies in other Provinces have already stacked the deck. They are in advanced stages of planning to leave and set up an alternative Anglican Communion that will look and behave very different from the old one. Whether it will succeed or not, and who or what will ultimately be in charge of it, is another question entirely. But it is hard to ignore that indeed, "things are now set in motion that cannot be undone."

The upshot of all this, it seems to me:

Our bishops would do well to respond to whatever is real, and I trust that they might indeed do so. Their initial response in March was a hopeful sign. Speaking in person with the Archbishop of Canterbury and others in the Anglican Communion might make cutting through the bluster and red herrings coming from some quarters all the easier.

Our Presiding Bishop offers a succinct overview of the House of Bishops, their authority, and what we can expect at next week's meeting. My takeaway is a general sentiment is that there is every intention to move forward with a sense of Spirit-filled mission, and to continue conversation with the greater Communion according to the rules: both those in The Episcopal Church, and according to the structures in place in the Anglican Communion, particularly the Anglican Consultative Council.

Some might mock appeals to polity and rules at this stage, claiming that the Bible trumps all, or, even more rightly, that Jesus comes first. Fair enough. But there is always a danger of excusing ourselves from moral responsibility for our actions by hiding behind Scripture, or even the name of Christ himself. Rules, imperfect as they are, help us navigate that important distinction, and more importantly, bound us in a community of mutual assent while we work out our disagreements.

Tom Woodward addresses the schismatic rejection of time-honored principles of Anglican Christianity in four well-worth-reading essays over at Episcopal Majority.

Tobias Haller is continuing an illuminating discussion over sexuality in the context of Christianity and Scripture, speaking to the heart of the manifesting issue that is driving much emotion around the present discord.

Granted there will be a great deal in the Anglican blogosphere about the HoB meeting next week. If you want to keep up, I suggest heading on over to Episcopal Café, where Jim Naughton plans ongoing coverage and to host a great deal of commentary from a variety of authors.

But a lingering concern for me these days is how many of us, myself included, have forgotten how the spin-doctors and a handful of bishops and their the enemy of my enemy is my friend alliances have, in various ways, hijacked the focus of the Anglican Communion with a very narrow set of issues now for over four years.

Perhaps it is past time to begin wresting it back. Some are already hard at it.

So I'll close this reflection by returning to the more personal, referencing an essay I posted recently on children's baptism over at Episcopal Café, where it received some well-worth-reading comments in reply.

I look forward to attending our diocesan clergy conference late this month that will welcome our Presiding Bishop, and we are doubly blessed with Archbishop Ngundane's visit to this diocese during our annual convention in October.

Finally, last Wednesday, I was privileged to be elected Rector of Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, California, where I have been serving for the past year as priest-in-charge ("Long-Term Interim"). So Hiroko, Daniel, and I are planning to stick around these here parts for quite sometime with some really loving and (thankfully) patient people!

Naturally, the concerns of the greater Anglican Communion, while important, have been taking a back seat for me recently to more local matters of Christian life and ministry.

But then, that is probably just as well...

Scoring Points

2007-09-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

Many seem to be trying to make hay out of the upcoming meeting between the Archbishop of Canterbury and our House of Bishops. The latest to join the fray is John Shelby Spong, retired Bishop of Newark, whose name and perennial reputation places him at the center of the Anglican equivalent of Godwin's Law.

A word to Bishop Spong from a (not so humble) parish priest: No thank you!

While many of us who agree with Bishop Spong on some matters and disagree with him on others have learned to tune out his condescending style, at this stage, I frankly cannot see how this point scoring is helpful. In fact, I worry that it undermines the very witness that is needed to effectively address the concerns that I and many others share with him.

There are so many better counterpoints to play against the hateful rhetoric that has been spewing forth in recent days. All the best prayers for our House of Bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury in that regard.

Home to Roost

2007-09-05T17:10:00.000-07:00

Now, at last, the long-brewing situation is coming home to roost for all parties involved.

Fr. Jake, Susan Russell, Davis Mac-Iyalla, Greg Griffith, and Kendall Harmon have all joined in repudiating outrageous statements reportedly coming from the episcopate in Nigeria. The real hatred and violence of rhetoric in parts of the Anglican Communion is now being shouted from the rooftops, it seems.

I am struck by the self-fulfilling prophecy, almost apocalyptic in tone, that this September is already coming to embody for the greater Church. It is a bold, raw moment for true Christians to step forward and show the light of Christ to one another. . . or to recoil into the darkness of schism and vituperation.

This will provide a true measure of the Archbishop of Canterbury and, to a lesser degree, our House of Bishops, and their sisters and brothers across the Communion.

Who will stand and be counted, indeed?

We watch, pray, and speak with hope of our God in Christ, who is the light "when all other lights have gone out."

Proportion and Absurdity

2007-09-04T21:52:00.001-07:00

So here's a concluding snapshot of Archbishop Drexel Gomez' sermon at the recent consecrations of two new missionary bishops. . .
. . . for former members of The Episcopal Church . . .
. . . who have now joined the Church of Kenya:

My brothers, you are entering the Episcopal ministry within the Anglican Communion at a time when the Communion is being severely challenged in each of the three related areas of the patristic tradition concerning Episcopal ministry. I refer to:

* The maintenance of eucharistic communion

* Continuity and apostolic teaching.

* Oversight of the churches.

The present impaired state of the Communion is due mainly to actions taken by the Episcopal Church of the United States of America in respect of human sexuality with special reference to the consecration of a bishop living in an opened homosexual relationship. The actions of the Episcopal Church have created a situation in which some Anglicans in the United States and throughout most of the Provinces of the Communion are convinced that the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is clear in its teaching and must take precedent over culture. Holding fast to this belief, they cannot accommodate those who believe the contrary. The issue is not primarily on of sexuality but one which seeks to answer the question "which relationships correspond to God’s ordering of life, and violate it?" It is a division of opinion between those of us who firmly believe that homosexual practice violates the order of life give by God in scripture and those who seek by various mean to justify what scripture does not hounour. We, in the Global South, whole heartedly support the position outlined by Richard Hays in ‘The Moral Vision of the New Testament:’

‘Paul singles out homosexual intercourse for special attention because he regards it as providing a particularly graphic image of the way in which human fallenness distorts God’s created order. God the Creator made man and woman for each other, to cleave together to be fruitful and multiply. When human beings ‘exchange’ these created roles for homosexual intercourse, they embody the spiritual condition of those who have ‘exchanged the truth about God for a lie.’

We believe that faithfulness to the gospel of Jesus Christ prevents us from compromising the truth so clearly revealed in holy scripture.

There is so much material here, that it would require days of careful writing to address in full. An assumption of responsibility is laid "mainly" at the doorstep of The Episcopal Church, laden with a quote based on a very narrow and disputable reading of a brief passage of Scripture, homosexuality is roundly condemned as "exchange" of choice. . .

And upon this the entire ecclesiological framework of communion, apostolic ministry, and oversight seems placed.

Despite all this, it is acknowledged that the current disagreement is a "division of opinion."

Is it to this that our House of Bishops must rationally and carefully respond? Thankfully, no. But then Gomez was instrumental in the Windsor Report as well as the more recent draft Anglican Covenant. He is not a minor player in the present crisis. So if this is indeed the substance behind the demands made by the Global South Primates through the most recent Communiqué, we have truly left the realms of faithful and rational disagreement altogether.

I do not envy the new bishops just consecrated in Nairobi. They have been handed, and have taken, if the Archbishop's words are to be understood at face value, the episcopacy entirely on the merits of a narrow argument over sexual ethics. Somehow, fidelity to this one way or another is equated in toto with fidelity to Christ. That seems to me to get the cart entirely before the horse. It makes Christ so small next to the specter of "homosexual practice." That is truly a mistake of proportion. Surely Christ for the good Archbishop is bigger than that. I dare say, Christ might be big enough to even belong as well to those of us who conscientiously and prayerfully disagree with the stance that Gomez++, Nzimi++, and other Global South Primates have taken . . . and then together have hung, if not hanged, the Communion upon it.

The question remains: why this particular ethical question, when any of us could name well over a dozen (many pertaining to sexuality) that have been disputed in the Anglican Communion and greater Church for years and some centuries?

I do not agree with the Archbishop's theological or scriptural interpretation, of course. But this is not my point here.

Rather, it is this:

Would I ever want to take up any ministry, regardless of the Order, under the auspices of a narrow and now clearly destructive contention over Christian ethics?

The answer is a simple no.

When I took up my vows of priestly ordination, it was to respond to the calling of Christ and the Church, and not really against or for any one particular issue or a particular understanding of a portion of biblical texts, but about embracing the whole of Scripture as "containing all things necessary for salvation." It was about furthering a life-long Christian vocation by following the lead of the Trinity through the discipline of Orders in the Church.

Archbishop Gomez, probably in an effort to make ecclesiastical-political hay out of a controversial action, hands these new bishops a sermon that seems to me quite sad, simply for its confining the reason for these irregular consecrations to a single issue. In doing so, it makes the present impasse almost cosmic, and relegates the potential for grace in this mess to hardly an afterthought.

And it begs the long-asked question: once the sexuality issue is settled for these new bishops and their flocks (in some ways it already is settled through a purifying march away from all who disagree with them) well what then? What will be left? In twenty years, will they look back and relish a sermon that implies their ordained ministry was re-defined by opposition to homosexuality?

I certainly hope not. To do so would be patently absurd.

My university chaplain warned me once never to define myself or my work by what or whom I am against.

These seem to me wise words for all of us in a contentious time.

For Some Insight

2007-09-02T18:21:00.000-07:00

September is now here, and the Dar Es Salaam Communiqué's September 30th ultimatum looms large, especially for those who are desiring a break with The Episcopal Church. The House of Bishops meets later in the month to decide how best to respond, and the Archbishop of Canterbury will join in conversation with them.

Meanwhile, some refreshing clarity is emerging from a number of stalwart bloggers. Here, for what it's worth, is what I have been reading:

First is this piece by Robert J. Brooks over at Episcopal Majority. It addresses the desire of some to expel The Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion, but more than that explores where the real constitutional authority resides as far as the Communion itself goes. In a word: look to the Anglican Communion Council. Fr. Jake offers a take on this analysis, and lots of commentary follows.

A second is a biblically rooted, pastoral, unflinching and at times scathing reflection by a colleague and neighbor, Rob Gieselmann, who honored me with a glimpse of an early draft before he posted it. I've already quibbled with him over some of the argumentation; indeed, as Jim Naughton writes, Rob has something to offend everyone; but the theme of his writing -- that we should all endeavor to handle the ongoing "crisis" with charity -- seems more than sound to me. Take a look.

Third, Tobias Haller is unfolding an argument on the matter of human sexuality, the manifesting question in all of this. Truly a Hooker scholar and a classical Anglican in the very best sense, Tobias' careful, cool, and pithy analysis is virtually unequaled in the blogosphere at present. His treatment has invited even a refreshingly civil conversation with Matt Kennedy of Stand Firm fame. It's well worth watching where this goes. Despite some efforts, including my own rather inept one, to widen the topic of conversation, Tobias will (quite rightly) not be deterred from a very focused and erudite treatment of the scriptural and theological questions at hand.

When all is said and done by the powers that be on all sides, prayers remain with our bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Communion as a whole.

May Christian hearts and charity prevail, and, indeed, may the will of God.

Redeeming Sabbath

2007-08-29T16:03:00.000-07:00

Sermon delivered at Church of Our Saviour,

Mill Valley, California
on the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 26th, 2007

Readings for Proper 16

It used to be said that if one sat in a café in Paris long enough, the entire world would walk by. Having never been in Paris, myself, I couldn’t say. But sitting yesterday for a bit over an hour at Peet’s even here in Mill Valley, I could almost translate the saying to our town. The incredible parade of people in and out – shoppers, walkers, the studious, the workers, the conversers, the readers. Meanwhile, a steady stream of vehicles rolled past, busy as any street in San Francisco.

Conversation around me ranged from, “So what wireless service do you use? (None of your business. . .)” to hedge funds, shopping lists, work, the vagaries of the stock market. Every other passerby had a cell phone stuck to his or her ear. Even a walk on a beautiful late summer afternoon might be wasted time if there was a friend, loved one, or coworker to speak with.

It was, quite frankly, astonishing even for me, who is a frenetic and sometimes obsessive worker, to sit still in the middle of all the activity. And on a Saturday, no less. During the normal work week, much of this business is exported to the city nearby or wherever many of us work. . . while our children and grandchildren are kept on the move at school, preschool, or by beleaguered parents who stay and keep the household up and running.

We are the always on culture. Except when we’re off. And we practically never are. We are all together, busier than a hive of bees, convinced of our own need to be more productive and more efficient with the short time we have been given. We are possessed by a sea of choices, goods, services, the clamor of news, music, television, internet. Between a river of resources we consume as a matter of course and a tenuous Creation straining under the load, we are made blind to the simplicity that so many of our ancestors took for granted.

Just speaking this tempts me to stand up and shout, “Stop!” for a moment. Have we forgotten the healing effects of a sound of the wind in the trees, the smell of a fresh air, the passing warmth of a fleeting summer, or the moisture of the fog on our faces? Have we lost as a collective community the ability to be utterly silent, wordless both in lips and minds, before our God?

So at a time when well over forty members of all ages of this community are preparing to gather together on a retreat entitled, “Keeping Sabbath,” and in a place and an age where Sabbath is more considered a luxury than a requirement . . . well, we get this Gospel reading!

It is vintage Luke, beautifully and vividly written. At the center is a crippled woman, bent over with the weight of years, and – perhaps Luke intended us to note her symbolic posture – heavily burdened with what Luke depicts as a draconian application of religious tradition. The leader of the synagogue who challenges Jesus for healing on the Sabbath seems to be completely out of touch with the needs right in front of him. As he does elsewhere in the gospels, Jesus reminds all who will hear him that the Sabbath is not an end unto itself. It is meant for us and our relationship with God and one another. It is a classic tale of legalism versus grace, easily inviting us to embrace the temptation to demonize Jesus’ opponents; even worse a religious tradition that cannot be divorced from our heritage as Christians.

But to do so, quite frankly, is to condemn ourselves. For we are as good as any society throughout history in trying to enforce rectitude through legislation, be it a bill moving through government, a careful compromise on canonical provisions for our church, or a policy in our own community that will make everything crystal clear. Don’t get me wrong, we probably need rules in many places, and good ones at that. But the word “good” begs the question. How do we know what serves us best and what doesn’t, what is “good” and what isn’t?

The question of today’s Gospel is about Sabbath: Our desperate need today as a community to recover it from the seemingly endless parade of sports, practibces, gadgets, the ever-increasing demands of work, and a sea of noise – that need will not be served by bringing back the strictures of the now abandoned and somewhat romantically remembered blue laws. Nor by deliberately depressing a frenetic economic engine upon which so much of our livelihood depends.

In all honesty, healthy spirituality cannot be legislated or economically engineered! It must be cultivated, beginning within our own hearts and in our own unique lives. Perhaps most of all through a determined and joint effort with our friends and families to say “no” at regular intervals to all the distractions from the gift of simple Being – life itself, given to us moment to moment by a God who wants almost desperately to love us out of all that robs us of well being.

Betsy, with her sermon last week, left us with the image of a tired runner finding remarkable pleasure in the cool, clear, refreshing water of a mountain stream. This is the image of Sabbath as it should be, a flowing current of refreshment, and not once or twice a year for the well-planned vacation, but the careful, deliberate, regular weekly rhythms that our spiritual ancestors cherished for their livelihood and the earth itself. Of tilling deep into the resources that cannot be purchased, marketed, or packaged: the resources of our own hearts and breath. Of engaging our faith as do Jesus and his disciples and the community gathered and then responding with humble silence and quietude for a time. The pleasurable resource of rest that lifts us out of the anesthetic effect of overwork and the madness of being overwrought with performance and productivity. The well-spring of simply being present in a moment that intersects with God’s eternal moment. Where we simply are without being defined by a million tugs and pulls at our tender existence.

And in fact, the restoring a sense of Sabbath is about restoring justice for ourselves and all who walk with us. Indeed, Sister Joan Chittister puts it this way:

The rabbis taught that the purpose of Sabbath was threefold. The first purpose of Sabbath, the rabbis said, was to free the poor as well as the rich for at least one day a week, and that included the animals, too. Nobody had to take an order from anybody on the Sabbath. The second purpose of Sabbath, the rabbis teach, is to give people time to evaluate their work as God evaluated the work of creation, to see if their work, too, is really life-giving. And finally, the purpose of Sabbath leisure was to give people space, to contemplate the real meaning of life. If anything has brought the modern world to the brink of destruction, it must surely be the loss of Sabbath.

Jesus, in a way that would affirm the best of the Jewish tradition, refuses to let Sabbath be anything less than attentive and renewing. For the burdened and harassed people, Jesus stands up to the powers that will co-opt and collapse Sabbath into a hollow shell of tradition – a habit rather than a true practice; an enforceable dictum rather than a life-giving discipline. The woman, bent over and crippled, epitomizes the tired lives of her people overwrought with enforced traditions that seem devoid of meaning. A great irony is that Sabbath, Jesus tells all who hear him – and to their great shame – has lost its purpose and meaning if it is only to be harshly inflicted.

It is a further irony for us that we, too, can be this woman – not crippled by an overzealous enforcement of Sabbath, but out of a lack of true Sabbath altogether! The call of Christ is to move beyond the hollow shells of our consumer-driven culture, our insatiable appetite for things rather than life, our obsession with performance and productivity rather than simple being. We are called back to the substance of who we are as human beings, to be restored like this woman; made whole and upright as created reflections of the Divine – lovingly connected as we were made to be, with Creation and each other just as God’s greatest joy is connected at the most intimate level with all that is.

Phyllis Tickle has said:

From the beginning of Judeo-Christian religion, there have been a number of ways of creating those little interruptions in normal life, those places where we can engage the mystery, those places of harmony and integration. A good Jew two thousand years ago would have known that one of the ways of interrupting life and meeting with the spiritual was the Sabbath. We used to keep the Sabbath. We used to set it aside and say, "Here is a time. Here is an interruption in one of the dimensions that informs life in which we will stop, and we will honor the Spirit of God. . .” We would honor the time before that consumption and the hours after that consumption by an interruption of all other habits. We would hallow the time around that event--the Eucharist or the Mass or the Communion. That's what the Sabbath was, and it had built around it time and place.

Our challenge as a community is to hold this time and place, this sacred now, despite all the forces that seek to encroach on it, eroding our time together to celebrate what we have received, what we have given, and even to find a bit of rest for the sake of all the human family and the Good News of God in Christ.

Sabbath, after all, is not ultimately about law, but about compassion: compassion for the needs of our bodies and minds to rest. Compassion for our loved ones and neighbors and their needs. Compassion for all the creatures of God and their renewal. Compassion for the sea, land, and air, that they may also rest refresh. And radical identification with and for the God of compassion, who revels in all that has been made and calls it good.

Withdrawing Comment

2007-08-29T09:35:00.000-07:00

A fray in recent hours over at Mark Harris' blog has stirred up some deeply emotional and caustic responses. I posted two, and then deleted them with a bit of shame, especially following Mark's admonition.

The whole episode was provoked by the posting of a graphic video assembled by the Church of England priest Peter Ould -- I'll let you find it yourself, if you must, as I simply have not the stomach to link it here -- drawing on a BBC dramatization of the burning at the stake of Bishops Ridley and Latimer on October 16th, 1555. The message was that their sacrifice should inspire similar witness from our all "true" bishops in the upcoming and widely-publicized meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the September 30th Primates-declared deadline that now looms large.

I managed to sit through Mel Gibson's painfully gory The Passion of the Christ a few years ago, yet I could not watch this video in its entirety. But that's just me. Then, I don't live in a part of the world where violence is an everyday occurrence, and I have the luxury of choosing to keep it at a safe distance. I honestly question if Peter Ould has had to witness violent physical death for the sake of the Gospel (or for any reason) up close and personal -- and if he had, would he be playing so loose with a Hollywood-style voyeuristic medium to make a point? Like many in the media-saturated West, most of us can decide to keep that stuff on the television or the movie screen while sitting comfortably in an armchair, the remote nestled warmly in our hand. Or we can decide to use such depictions for our own causes without reference to any consequences.

Too many of our Anglican sisters and brothers have no such choice.

All that said, the implications of the video and its accompanying commentary (some I found equally as disturbing) were clear. Like Ridley and Latimer we have Christ and you do not. If you want to be "real men" (alluding to Latimer's last words) then you must agree with us.

We all should steel ourselves: It's this type of caustic rhetoric that is likely to reach a deafening climax as the House of Bishops prepare for their meeting and September 30th draws rapt attention around the Anglican Communion and blogosphere.

In this way, the video appears to me a cheap shot intended only to provoke a primitive emotional response and rally the ecclesiastical troops for a showdown. It lends nothing to reasoned, prayerful discussions of the matters at hand, let alone any efforts at reconciliation. It does nothing to promote the God-given dignity of anyone, even its proponents. Nor does it seem to me likely to convert bishops to any cause. In fact, it may have precisely the opposite effect.

Finally, the very real threat of spiritual and physical violence resulting from schism seems insufficient for some reason. Apparently the specter of broken communities, severed friendships, empty stomachs and disease-riddled lives where aid can no longer reach -- all of this is no longer sufficient to forestall division, brook the true courage of charity, or even the simple, precious gift of humble civility. The dramatization of a particularly nasty 16th-century burning at the stake now seems more compelling and trumps what is yet real and painful in the present hour.

I sadly wonder why?