A Time to Pray

From Bishop Marc:

The devastating news coming out of Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, in the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia, affects us all, and the whole body of our Church is suffering as this academic community suffers. I must speak personally, as both Sheila and I are graduates of Virginia Tech. I came into the Episcopal Church through the Episcopal College ministry there. As I think about the interconnected community of students, faculty, and staff in that rural, beautiful part of Virginia, such a senseless act is all the more poignant and indeed confusing.

I ask the people of this Diocese, people of such deep prayer, who keep in their hearts the concerns of communities and peoples throughout the world, to hold with those ongoing prayers particular concerns for this suffering community in Blacksburg. The parish serving the town and university is Christ Church, Blacksburg.

Everliving God, the foundation of peace and the comfort of all who mourn and encounter suffering and pain beyond understanding, grant your people grace, that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Update: Bishop Marc has posted a further reflection at his blog.

He's Coming

The Archbishop of Canterbury, in a news conference in Canada, has just announced he intends to accept the invitation of the House of Bishops to visit with them in September -- and bring members of the Primates' Steering Committee with him.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been roundly criticized by all sides, but part of me continues to wonder if he isn't working out a much longer-term strategy that hopes to outlast some of the more belligerent voices that have proven so painfully divisive. That's as far as dare to go with speculation, expect only to say that Rowan Williams is -- for sure -- much smarter than I am. (Which is why he's the Archbishop of Canterbury and I am not!) :)

It seems good news to me that he has agreed to engage in an opportunity for deepening relationship, avoiding the pitfalls that have dominated Anglican discourse recently: of blatant objectification of our sisters and brothers in Christ and lobbing thinly veiled theological and ecclesiological threats at each other over oceans.

Good for Rowan Williams, I say, and I say again good for our House of Bishops, but with one major caveat -- one I add to this post much too late. That is, Rowan Williams will apparently be meeting with our bishops, but not our Executive Council, nor any of our LGBT advocates, except perhaps +Gene Robinson. In this way, more subtle objectification continues -- not only of those in our church most directly affected by the Primates' recommendations, but of our laity as well. It's another sign that Rowan Williams (and many of the Primates for that matter), at best, comes out of a very different ecclesiastical culture than ours. At worst, it only perpetuates the darkest side of this whole mess: the continued disenfranchisement of devoted members of this church.

And perhaps, as Fr. Jake suggests, the Archbishop of Canterbury is only coming under duress. That indeed shifts the "glass-half-full" view of his visit to "glass-half-empty." Jake tends to be more generally suspicious than I, but then he's got much more experience, too.

Meanwhile, Mark Harris alludes to Ezekiel with the question "Can these Bones Live?" in a thoughtful and insightful (no surprise there!) analysis of where things stand with the Instruments of Unity and the Anglican Communion.

I can only reiterate that I agree wholeheartedly with his central point: real Communion is found in mutual, on-the-ground, incarnational relationship, not in Primates' Communiques, ultimatums, or (arch)bishops rattling their respective ecclesiastical swords.

What Kind of Faith will We Have?

Sermon delivered at Church of Our Saviour,

Mill Valley, California
on the Second Sunday of Easter

April 15th, 2007

Readings for The Second Sunday of Easter

audio available

Every Second Sunday of Easter, we hear once again this passage from the Gospel According to John: a passage known for the second and third appearances of the Risen Christ to the Jesus’ followers – the first, in case you've been counting, was to Mary Magdalene in the garden outside the tomb. A passage known for a strange manner of Christ’s appearing – of Jesus somehow and mysteriously being no longer blocked by shut and locked doors. Of a risen body as strange as inspiring – of marks in the flesh that hold evidence of the crucifixion, and yet somehow different from the flesh and blood we know.

For us living in the West in the twenty-first century, this story about the Risen Christ is as strange as it is tantalizing. Our understanding of the human person, of biology, anthropology and even cosmology are so radically different from that of the apostles and the author of John that the Resurrection narratives of Scripture can risk getting lost to us in a sea of cultural translation.

One of the great counterpoints for me this past Holy Week and Easter is in the midst of the great Christian mystery of salvation, the heart of our faith, I’ve been reading Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, a pre-eminent and popularizing physicist’s follow-up to The Elegant Universe, which was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist. Through Brian Greene's words, I have been reading about the great scientific minds of the Enlightenment up to and through the twentieth century – from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein to the foundation of quantum mechanics, the discovery of a runaway expansion in the universe, to the likes of Heisenberg and particle accelerators, quarks, strings, and inflationary Big Bang theories. Greene’s enthusiasm leaps off page after page as he makes some of the most arcane and highly technical aspects of his vocation accessible, yet intellectually stimulating, to the average reader. But, of course, he makes little or absolutely no reference to God or Christ – probably for a number of very sensible reasons.

And so while reading this I was, of course, turning regularly to the familiar (to us Christians) central stories written and experienced at a time when God was believed to dwell beyond the dome of the sky, the earth was thought by many flat and bounded by the sea, and spirits good and evil dwelt if not in every corner then at least in the wilderness, near at hand.

And then, as part of my vocation as priest and my faith as Christian I was called to proclaim Christ both publicly and privately as “Savior,” “Risen” and “Son of God.” Like a love sonnet that seems to be playing a different tune dissonant with that of our scientific world – a language and a worldview that attempts to define all things with clarity of formula or probability more than with placing faith in mystery.

It’s a conundrum I’ve held off until Easter, quite frankly. Maybe, to be honest, because I was holding out hope that Easter this year – unlike previous years – would reveal something startling and utterly profound that would solve the tension we all hold to a greater or lesser degree inside: a tension between the “seeing is believing. . .and even then. . .” of our contemporary society, and a faith rooted in a thoroughgoing notion of God’s omnipresence and transcendence – where nothing matters outside of God’s gracious will – the faith of so many of our ancestors. In all honesty I stand before you on the second Sunday of Easter a bit disappointed. No great insights. I haven’t been struck by lightning.

Well. . .at least not yet.

Faith in our time can be a confusing matrix of conflicting opinion and world views. It is tempting on one side to engage in blind belief – to shut off our contemporary mindsets at the entrance to the Church or before we crack open the Bible or before we pray – something we often catch ourselves frowning on when we hear it articulated in various ways by some of our sisters and brothers. It is tempting on the other side to engage in a thoroughgoing skepticism that can range into agnosticism, where we risk believing next to nothing and potentially leading a life of confused, individualistic indifference. Some have accused the West of such an impoverished spirituality – if it can be called that – and it is hard to counter them. Surely don’t want a faith devoid of intellectual rigor nor so lukewarm that it has no meaning or power in our lives.

But thankfully, we have today’s Gospel. I say thankfully because it does not necessarily demand belief or certitude about any particular kind of cosmology or adopting any particular cultural viewpoint in any thoroughgoing way. It does not demand Christ having a particular kind of resurrected biological body that we could discover by parsing the language of the text itself, let alone imagining scientists taking measurements or Jesus recounting what precisely happened at 12:01 a.m. on Easter Morning. The appearance in John's Gospel narrative only hints at something unusual, transcendent, and divine, and leaves it there. With hints. With mystery. The nature, in the precise language of today's science, of Christ’s body is not the heart of the passage.

The Risen Christ comes to his followers not with some kind of description of Resurrection or expectations around a mathematically justifiable principle to define himself. He doesn’t even demand belief in particulars about his body but instead simply utters, “Peace be with you.” Shalom.

The disciples like us had their own internal conflicts between worldviews and what would happen next for them regarding their faith. More pressing was what to do about the religious authorities who might be out to get them, too. For the community in which John’s Gospel was written, the conflict was about how to move forward with being faithful when the Christian community had become anti-societal in a broader Jewish context – when their Jewish roots were being cut off from both within and without. Where their identity was in crisis.

In some ways, so is ours. We are like them.

And Jesus says, “Peace be with you.” He breathes on his followers and commends them to the ministry of reconciliation.

It is Thomas who is most recognizable to us living in the skeptical age that we do. . .an age that demands evidence. But he is not offered the evidence of the Risen Christ until he is with the others in community again. And Thomas, when he proclaims, “My Lord and my God!” upon seeing the Risen flesh of Christ, is only gently chided by Jesus, who reminds him that the greatest blessing falls upon us who believe but have not seen with our own eyes – at least not in the narrow way Thomas had.

Which, quite frankly, is most frustrating for us in a post-Christian culture, where proof is often demanded and cynicism abounds. Our faith is too much like Thomas’ at times. We want God, Christ, and Resurrection on our own terms – perhaps even mathematically and scientifically bounded so we can be certain.

But God knows us better than that. Thomas might have been convinced for a while at seeing and touching the wounds of Christ, but would that have put an end to the questions later on? And what kind of witness could he offer when presented with a simple assertion that perhaps he was delusional, as we, even as Christians, would probably regard most people who talk about meeting the dead, or touching resurrected bodies? Thomas demanded evidence, but the Risen Christ was not so interested in evidence as Thomas or we might be.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, we are not free to live into the joy of the Resurrection until we begin to see beyond our narrow intellectual constructs of what is true and what isn’t. We will not grasp the full joy of Resurrection, until we begin to understand faith not as offering blind assent, but living deeply into relationship. Until we begin to understand belief as more than provable hypotheses or defended theory. Until we begin to understand belief instead as following in a Way where conquering death and fear involves entering the conflicted parts of our lives and communities and reclaiming the Risen Christ’s simple words to his followers: “Peace be with you.” Shalom.


I have yet to have the pleasure of meeting or hearing Brian Greene in person – I hope some day that I might – but based on what I've read of him, I would venture that even he would argue that he works on truth of a particular kind – rooted in mathematics, empirical evidence, hypothesis, and the generation and testing of evolving theory. We Christians wrestle with truth of a different kind.

The Risen Christ leaves Thomas’ concerns somehow honored and intact. The Risen Christ of Easter leaves us to wrestle with the intellectual, mathematical, and physical mysteries of the universe and God’s relationship with, through, and beyond it. Christ endows good minds and particle accelerators to plumb the questions of Einstein, Newton, Galileo and great contemporary minds like Brian Greene. He leaves the exacting questions of deep-thinking theologians to the theologians.

The Risen Christ, it seems to me, does not expect intellectual comprehension to precede relationship.

Which makes sense, actually. How many of us understand our best friends, our children, our spouses, or even ourselves in any thorough-going intellectual sense?

Why then do we expect ourselves to somehow understand God in the Risen Christ any better?

The message and mystery of Resurrection is much more simple, and much more profound than intellectually rigorous. Which is probably as it should be. Resurrection was not meant for only the intellectually adept and curious (although it belongs to them, too, of course), but was meant too for little children, the aged, the infirm, the uneducated, the powerless, the poor, and people of all walks of life both far and near. It was meant for the scientist as well as the banker. For the librarian as well as the farmer. It was intended for those who say “seeing is believing” like Thomas, for the inspired women first at the tomb like Mary Magdalene, and the bold and sometimes foolish folk who sometimes barely recognize the difference between faith and doubt, let alone stop to ponder it – like Peter.

It was intended for the likes of you and me who spend much of our lives like much of our culture: skeptical, uncertain, bathed in information and opinion, and sometimes living on the borders of existential despair. And yet at other times, of course, joyous, filled with Spirit, hungry to give and receive love, and brimming with hope.

The Risen Christ comes among us in all of our complex humanity, breathing on us the blessing of Spirit and gently uttering peace – shalom – to fear-weary souls. We are, put most simply, freed by the Resurrection. Freed from the power of fear. And freed from the power of death in all its forms. Free to forgive. Free to heal – ourselves and others. Free to embrace relationships that bring transformation. Relationships with mysterious people and a mysterious God who defies our intellectual constructs and world views and demands only that we embrace and offer to others the grace and love of life we have received in whatever way we are best gifted. And to do so no longer in isolation, but in the rough and tumble of community.

And free to love with a clarity and a sense of renewed purpose: the fruits of Resurrection that motivated first apostles broke out into the streets and towns proclaiming the Good News of the Risen Christ to everyone who would listen.

Fr. John: Threats Real and Imagined

My friend and colleage, John Kirkley of meditatio, has just posted a pithy summation of the real spiritual challenges presently in front of our Church -- and the forces presently arrayed to distract us all from them. Here's an excerpt:

Seriously though, I think there are any number of real threats to Christianity and creation that cry out for our attention. Global warming and climate change is probably number one on the list. While some on the right wing of the Church decry our commitment to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, what they fail to realize is that this commitment comes from a recognition of the real threats to Christianity, Christian institutions, and, more importantly, the human project on this planet: the poverty, disease, and oppression that destroy the people of God and the earth that sustains us.

If Christ is the Savior of the world, then his Body, the Church, should be committed to Christ's project of saving (healing) that world, no?

Sebastian Moore has identified what I take to be the real threat we face, that which undergirds the maintenance of all the other death-dealing forces arrayed before us: the loss of hope and of community. "The world to which the Christian story no longer speaks," writes Moore, "is a world in which individualism has deadened the nerve of a common hope that has been unforgettably quickened, traumatized, and re-enlivened with the joy of God." (Jesus the Liberator of Desire, p. x)

The is surely true in the West, where our growing consumerism, social mobility and consequent isolation, our very "success" has reduced our world to what we can make, sell, buy, and control. It is a small world indeed, without connection, without mystery, and without hope. Community, and particularly the memory it carries, is the source of hope. The Church, if it is to be about the work of saving, healing, must create communities capable of memory and therefore of hope: the memory of the Forgiving Victim who sets us free from our isolation and fear and obsession to be for others in healing community.

Well worth reading the whole thing. Perspective at this stage is terribly important.

God Out of the Box

Sermon delivered on Easter Sunday
April 8th, 2007
at Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, California

Hiroko, Daniel, and I decided to go to Stinson Beach a few weeks ago to get away from it all. It was Hiroko suggested that we try flying our kites – something we hadn’t done literally in years, and certainly not since Daniel had been born. So I grumped around the apartment trying to find them. Hiroko, of course, knew where they were and pointed me in the right direction, and we headed to the beach on a partly cloudy day. There was no wind. But we had fun, anyway, impersonating Charlie Brown running with his kite, and Daniel dug in deep to the sand near the ocean’s edge while the sandpipers ran back and forth in the surf. It was a great scene, rollicking at the water’s edge with kites that would not fly, laughing out loud while our three-and-a-half year old began to cover himself in the wet sand.

Kites are the first image I’d like to use today for the Resurrection. Because we began with a problem and ended with a mystery. If you’ve ever had a kite, you’ve had to deal with tangled kite string. And unwrapping an old box kite I’ve had since before my high school days was a proof in point. Kites never quite pack properly, you see. They seem destined somehow to fly – to leave the box, even an inanimate as they are. A spar pokes out here. The kite string leaves the spool and turns into a knotted mess over there. After having searched so hard for the kites, I’d thought I’d be irritated untangling kite string. But on the beach with the smell of sea salt and the sand beneath our feet – well, many things become possible!

Here’s another image for Resurrection – yes it’s the butterfly on the cover of our Easter Worship bulletins today. Take a look. Frankly, up until now, I found the butterfly not so helpful as an image to describe the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We can biologically study the development of the butterfly from egg to caterpillar to pupa to its colorful stage with gossamer wings. We can explain the processes that govern a creature that really never dies but, of course, changes radically. But what captured Resurrection for me as I reflected on the butterfly this Easter was the newly-winged insect emerging from the pupa. If you’ve ever seen it happen on video, you know what I mean. The butterfly just doesn’t fit into the chrysalis anymore. It must break free. And as its wings first fill with the fluids of life, it is clear it can’t fit anymore into the old way of being. Somehow, that says something about Resurrection – the Risen Christ cannot fit anymore into the old way of being.

Back at home, Resurrection is about Daniel trying, in his three-year-old way trying to dress himself. With arms sticking out in all directions – elbows, fingers, fore-arms, knotted wrists – trying to poke his head through the right part of the shirt. Funny, the shirt should fit him, but he can find many ways not to fit into it. That’s life in the Resurrection.

What is God up to?

Each year, we gather on Easter Sunday to celebrate something that doesn’t quite fit, and yet it does. Something has happened that we can’t quite explain, and yet we celebrate it anyway. Something we can’t quite explain but we see signs of everywhere we look. It’s in the spring air, the flowers, the new leaves. It’s in the ocean side and on the beach and the mountaintop. It’s in the farthest flung heavens where stars are being born. It’s in our lives and the lives of those we love even when we thought we knew them and they surprised us. Even when we thought we knew our own limitations and something happens and we discover something new about ourselves.

It’s in this community. This strange community called the Church. A community that fits, but not quite, into the surrounding culture. Every Church that has fully become a product of its culture has always disappeared. But the Church across the ages that knows Resurrection is like the kite that won’t quite fold, the three-year-old who won’t fit into the fashionable shirt, or the butterfly that no longer fits in its chrysalis.

We are an Easter people. Would it not have been more real to come on Good Friday than today? Crucifixion, after all, makes more sense if you think about it, than Resurrection. Executions have happened throughout history. We know death, suffering and their powerful hold on humanity. We don’t need to gather as a community and break bread and share the common cup to “get” death.

No, we gather, because we are an Easter people. Which means we are a people reborn of hope. Which means we recognize what the world calls normal and then add something too strange and wonderful for words to adequately describe. We are the people who shout “life” when the world declares, “death.” We are the people who say “arise” when the world says, “lay down.” We are the people who recognize something now deeply woven into the fabric of life that is connected profoundly with a God. . . a God who does not quite fit into boxes, whether they are intellectual constructs, ancient human traditions, or tombs hewn out of stone.

Our God in Jesus Christ is a God of surprises, even when it comes to death. Today we remember that death has been re-forged and snatched out of the hands of evil. It is no longer an end for humanity, but a new beginning. Today we celebrate all who have come before us – those who have died but yet are alive somehow, in ways we cannot explain, in all who count themselves in God’s children, beyond time, greater than our moment-to-moment existence can even imagine.

Today, we see the empty tomb, revealed to Jesus’ followers and at first perplexing them. They have fallen into an unexpected mystery that again fits their Teacher’s Way. Remember this Jesus? The one who was always turning the world order upside down? Who said the first are last and the last are first? Who had the power to heal and lead, and might have spawned a violent revolution, and yet instead heals and proclaims God’s love for the forgotten and dons a towel and washes his followers' feet?

So why not take on death, too, and turn it upside down? Death becomes not the end but a new beginning. It is a gateway into life that is so incredibly new, it is almost unrecognizable. The women who had followed Jesus find an empty tomb and are perplexed. Even when the angels describe to them what has happened, they can scarcely understand. There is no resuscitated corpse or reanimated body. There is no parlor or magician’s trick whereby Jesus somehow managed to survive crucifixion. This is the mystery of New Life. New Hope. And it will not fit into the tomb. It won’t even fit into our greatest and best hopes. It is God’s New Word for a people hungry for something they cannot describe. It is the transformation that the world searches for. It sets the captives free and brings Good News to the poor and the destitute. It turns hearts of stone into living hearts again. It breathes new life into what was utterly dead. And, in some way, it is the light behind the sunlight, the power that rests at the foundation of the cosmos, the renewal that marks rebirth. It makes common things like bread and wine holy. It silences the powerful and gives voice to the voiceless. It demands everything that we are and then makes it new again.

Look again this Eastertide – all fifty days of it – for the miracles, both great and small, that smell, taste, and feel like the fragrant new Body of Christ. You may not recognize them at first. They might appear in your garden, in your neighbor, in a loved one, or in your own heart. They will appear in this community in unexpected ways. They will surprise us, just as the Resurrection surprised Mary Magdalene, Peter, and the first apostles. They will startle us, just when we thought we understood how everything worked. And they will make us anew.

Our God does not live in boxes, whether made by humanity or death itself. Our God is out of the box. So watch out. Be ready for anything. And find your joy, life, and love renewed.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!