The Moral Test

Written in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the President’s response...

I’ll leave it to the historians and recognized scholars to decide whether or not America is a nation, a people. But I will reflect here that a famous conservative politician of the late twentieth century once confidently declared that “society is nothing more than a collection of individuals.”

Are we greater than that? Do we aspire to be?

When a man who swears only by the jungle stumbles into the Presidency, we cannot expect him to see society. And nationhood to him is only a collection of individuals who might serve his interests or suit his tastes.

I believe it when a chaotic personality expresses displeasure at disordered chaos in the violent clash of protesters. A chaotic personality instinctively seeks order in externalities: gilded, clean halls as a balm for his internal strife. People doing what they are told, obeying simple, straightforward rules. I also believe it when he can only see disobedience to laws intended to preserve order, and not the deeper moral complexities of human motivation; let alone the philosophical differences between, say, sociopathic nihilism and the socializing instinct to protect a peaceful, dignified, diverse community.

I believe that he cannot understand that, while violence of all kinds must be eschewed, the moral universes of white supremacy and an anti-fascist countermovement could not be more starkly different.

The moral failure of our so-called President over the past five days puts our union — dream or fact — into a level of doubt that many of us have not experienced in our lifetimes. And it reflects a hollow center in our republic that should shock us, at least if there is any hope for this strange experiment in diverse democracy left.

His predecessor, no doubt, would have repudiated this resurgent collective sin of racism without hesitation. As a matter of fact, he already did, scoring the highest number of likes ever recorded for a Twitter post. (That must make the Tweeter-in-Chief most uneasy.) But Obama is no longer President, and so many of us still feel bereft of moral leadership.

But we do well not to neglect the grace-filled question of the moment.

Were Obama still President this night, with his strong rhetoric and erudition, we would be risking at this point letting him speak for us, acting practically as our moral proxy. We would be posting his words, maybe taking up a phrase or two, admiring his clarity, extolling his appeal to our virtue.

And we would risk believing that we had arrived.

He was hated for this very reason. And he rhetorically left little doubt, thus leaving many who were still wandering their dangerous mazes of prejudice and bigotry out in the cold. Now they want back in, and they are angrier than ever.

This is not a criticism of Obama. No, this is a criticism of our king-making, celebrity culture. We want our President to be our ethical and moral proxy, our healer, our great reconciler. We want to be told how to think, how to behave, how to believe. How to get along.

Our most primitive parts want him (or her) to look, think, and act like our most noble imagined selves; or to diabolically justify and focus our darkest, most ignoble impulses.

We want to remain moral children.

This country’s founders worried about centralizing power in the Presidency, and its echoes of crown princes, queens, and emperors and their overweening temperaments and the infantilizing effect they had on their subjects. Like the prophet Samuel, when the ancient Israelites desperately wanted to be like other nations and have a king, the architects of our democracy knew that to ladle so much power, trust, and authority on a frail human being was ultimately a recipe for misery.

Now we have a man who — above most, if not all other men who preceded him in this office — has failed a key moral test.

That is no longer a question, and, yes, it makes him, sitting at the helm of the powers of the State and at the center of a fragile democracy, remarkably dangerous. That we should seek his swift removal from this position of power is also a question beyond doubt.

But the grace-filled question, the critical moral test before us now, is whether we will fall with him into the moral vacuum of the jungle...

Or if we, despite him, will grow up and decide for ourselves whether we are a nation, a society.

And if so, just what kind of society we will be.

Easter Saturday / Earth Day

“God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” - Genesis 1:31

Someone once challenged me to justify Christian ecological concern using scripture. We need look no further than the first chapter of Genesis. Who are we to damage and destroy what God has deemed good?

God has woven an Easter hope into the very fabric of life itself. The biosphere, like our bodies, has an astonishing capacity to heal. And like us, an astonishing capacity to rise again to new life.

Our destruction of the natural world is a reflection of our sinful insistence on living in a Good Friday universe, where we crucify Life itself in the name of our own fear, our craven desire for power, and our boundless capacity for self-destruction.

But Christ rises from death and appears in the garden. Mary Magdalene mistakes him for the gardener, but perhaps this isn’t a mistake at all, but a reminder that the Maker of the Garden rises again in the context of creation, in the midst of the vibrant springing forth of all life season by season, year by year, epoch by epoch.

Too many Christians have mistaken scientists as the enemies of faith, but what we have failed to comprehend is that so many are the observers of the goodness of Creation, the recorders of the wonder that -- as we Christians might put it -- God began and Christ continues to redeem.

Science as a discipline has its roots in the Christian academy: the university. Part of being an Easter people is about healing the false rift between science and religion, and remembering that what God has made -- and what God is prepared to raise to new life if we will only allow -- is indeed very good.

Easter Thursday vs. Emotional Narcissism

Do you believe?

This unnerving question haunts the Easter community of Christ. But too often, we hear it as a demand to offer intellectual assent to the implausible or, perhaps even worse, an expectation that we must feel a certain way before we can judge ourselves faithful. Both are paltry versions of belief that don’t get us very far.

What happens as the Easter glow fades and the Great Fifty Days are still before us? When the zeal of the newly converted wears thin? When the honeymoon is over?

Thomas continues to ask questions. Mary Magdalene’s witness falls on incredulous ears. The first apostles wonder what to do next and sometimes gather in fear. Even when directly confronted by the Risen Christ, Peter is bewildered and unsure.

But belief is not overruled by doubt, fear, or confusion.

As for the first apostles, so it is for us:

Believing is about choosing to remain in relationship.
It is about the hard path of learning to trust.
It is about the discipline of showing up.

Who knows how we will feel today or tomorrow?

But for God in Christ, all that is secondary. What matters is that we choose to be an Easter people. Mary Magdalene persists in delivering her message. The apostles continue to gather, in fear or not. Peter answers the call and puts one foot in front of the other.

That is what believing is about.

Easter Wednesday vs. the Limits of Historicity

I catch myself trying to read the story of the Road to Emmaus as mere history, caught up like a good Gentile in Luke’s apparent effort to turn the Gospel into an historical account. Our conceit to literalize Easter founders when we relegate the Risen Christ’s self-revelation to only a mid-first-century encounter.

When did we decide that story was *less* than history? And myth was less than truth? The road to Emmaus is the story of Jesus walking with us, often unrecognized, reinterpreting our most closely held stories and histories as the eternal divine story of life and love conquering death and despair.

What if the Risen Christ is on the road of life with each and all of us together, not as an artifact of history, but right now? The love in our hearts as we ask those burning questions of one another? The tender compassion that greets us in a smile, in a supportive hand, in confronting us with the hard but wondrous truth that we are loved beyond all imagination?

Easter Wednesday is the day we are reminded to pray, "Be known to us, Jesus, in the breaking of the bread." That is not a historical moment, but an ever-present and eternally holy now; as we engage in relationship and share the nourishing bread of life with one another...

And find God closer than our breath, with us in the very fabric of our relationships with one another, the earth, and the whole cosmos.

Easter Tuesday vs. the Arrogance of Caesar

Even after defeating death itself, Christ does not rule like an earthly emperor or king. He greets his followers in hidden rooms and seeks them out in fearful places. He walks with them along the road. He dines with them on simple fish by the lakeshore. He is not troubled by our lack of recognition or ill-tempered at our ignorance and timid faith. He only asks, “Do you love me?” and, if we do, he commands us only to feed and care for one another.

The rulers of this world posture, bluster, don cloaks of violence, and send forth great armies, concealing their incompetence with a veneer of arrogance. Compassion is always secondary to the laws of fearful statecraft, and humanity and the natural world are commodified and expendible in the economy of the anti-Christ.

Despite all this, the Ruler of the Universe who died for us rises to new life and lives among us and in and through us with a disarming humility.

For all the shameful ways the world marginalizes, we are not alone.

And we never will be again.

Easter Monday vs. Dreams of the Dead

What a fascinating, terrifying age we live in, where little boys who never grew up sit astride apocalyptic powers, trying to live into the death-dealing dreams of their grandfathers, and millions of lives hang in the balance.

This is the culture of death writ large in a world crafted by the long-deceased. The dead teach and lead the dead.

But we resist the Culture of Death. God’s radical hope is not waiting around for us to grow up. The New Life has already arisen and walks and lives among us, calling us forth from the tombs, as the old song goes.

This is the paradox of Easter:

Life renewed in the face of the Culture of Death.

Courage, my sisters and brothers.

God of Shadows

A Reflection for the Quiet Days of Advent
The Bishop’s Ranch
Healdsburg, California

This is a very strange Advent. And that, I suppose, is saying something for a season that is meant to be strange. Talk of angels appearing to virgin peasants, wild men shouting at crowds in the desert, and the strange intersection of prophecy, worldly power, and divine favor have always made Advent an odd season, filled with paradoxes and contradictions.

But this one seems especially odd with a body politic turned on its head and things I grew up assuming and trusting no longer reliable. This Advent feels like someone turned out the light of enlightenment and odd shadows are thrown this way and that as one person’s rising star becomes another’s heart of darkness.

Serving a largely politically liberal community has met me with unexpected questions that I could have scarcely imagined even a year ago. What does it mean, for instance, to pray for our our new government-elect? What do we ask for? What do we pray for when it comes to the world’s fiefdoms and principalities and powers changing hands in ways we did not expect, and in ways that many of us didn’t want? What does it mean when we pray (as we do in my parish) for our new administration-elect to be granted wisdom and compassion? What do we legitimize or de-legitimize with such a prayer?

Which takes us to an even more ancient question of faith: Do we only pray for what we want or desire? Do we only praise God when we deem something that happens is good? And do we pray for things to change only when something is unfolding that we deem harmful or bad? Do we face the darkness only praying for the light? Do we ask for darkness to fall on those whom we deem benighted, and light and gracious power on those we deem enlightened?

Our fundamental bias is that we often believe that ours is the God only of daybreak, of light, of illumination. Something or someone else commands the darkness and shadow. And so we, like the ancient Greeks and some of our early Christian ancestors, imagine or at least pray as though the world is divided up spiritually and even materially into light and dark, daybreak and shadow, good and evil.

The womb is also a place of shadows, and we all began our lives in the dark. Our habit is often to romanticize the womb as a place of loving warmth, and for all of us blessed with loving mothers, it can certainly be that. But the womb also contains the seas and storms of billions of years of evolution, of cells organizing over and against chaos, of marking the boundaries between the energy of life and the dissolution of death, between child and mother, between this life, that life, and not life. It is about the infinitely complex dance of genes, chance, and circumstance mysteriously created by and infused with a Spirit who knew us even before we were conceived. It is about the death of billions before us that taught our bodies and minds how to survive, develop, and grow for a brief time in this world. And even then, it is simple biology but hard for us emotionally that over two thirds of attempted starts on this journey fail. So our very being knew death, chance, and vulnerability from the very moment of conception. To the very essence of every cell, we learned death before life, we knew the shadows before we saw the light.

That God risked everything to emerge into our world through this dangerous, unpredictable, and astonishingly miraculous process is in itself a testimony that ours is the God of shadows, a God who knows death and the role it plays in our development and the unfolding of our universe. And ours is a God who knows daybreak in the darkness, and the shadows that come with the light.

It is only our very deep Greek and Eastern cultural and philosophical influences that often bifurcate a reality of life and death, light and shadow, death and life. But to God, all of this – including the light and the shadow – just like energy and matter, space and time — are made of the same unnamed, mysterious  stuff, part of the same process, part of the inextricably intertwined pattern of Creation. It is not enough to blithely say – as we sometimes do – that without darkness there can be no light, and without daybreak there can be no shadow. It is more accurate to say that God is the God of both, and there is a deeper reality in which both are one.

And that deeper reality is one that only God knows and understands.

So God is God, too, of our odd political moment. Which I suppose is not very odd in the grand scheme of things. Jesus was conceived and born in a world of odd political moments in his own time, and the quest for power and intrigue was already as old then as the tradition of prophets and kings, of powers and principalities, of despots, of empires.

God is God, too, of our shadows. Of our failings and of our blindnesses. Of those benighted parts of our souls scurrying for cover to nurse their neuroses or those parts of us yearning for the light. God is there, too, ever at work — an understanding both comforting and unsettling, paradoxical, and yet very much made to order for Advent.

The message of the incarnation that we lift up — as the shadows are long, the days are short, and daybreak comes late — is that God is the God of all of us, divided souls and communities, of diverse and conflicted peoples, God of a world teetering ever on uncertainty. Ours is a God who meets us in death as well as in life, a God who understands both the birth of stars and the vast darkness between them, a God who sees the death of every part of us making way for the new, who knows the fullness of not only our life, but our death as organisms, the deaths even of our very thoughts, the loss of memory, the dissolution of reason itself… and all their redemption and more.

As the mystic Psalmist has written:
Darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day; 
darkness and light to you are both alike. (139:11)

An Advent practice then is to learn how to pray in the darkness, in the shadow, in the land of uncertainty and fear, in the creeping doubts and inchoate worries. For God dwells there, too, and God — always — has the last word.

Stirring in the Darkness

“Who then shall stir in this darkness, prepare for joy in the winter night?”

- Carol Christopher Drake

It is difficult not to feel this year that wider society has entered a collective winter night of the soul. We have gone rigid with fear in the wake of terrorism and in the midst of a campaign season that can find no bottom to lows in public discourse. Ghosts of nightmares stir in the swirling chill, old memories of history recent past but seemingly long forgotten: the cold of bigotry, willful ignorance, open deceit. No one seems to listen anymore. It is just assertions shouted over the voices of everyone else. Those who shout the loudest win. We are sorted, but not into goats and sheep with the care of simple husbandry. Instead we are sifted ham-fistedly into winners and losers with winner-take-all.

Who then shall stir in this darkness? Who would want to? And where can we find joy when the shadows grow so long and the chill seems unusually cold this year?

Anxiety has always been a part of our condition. It must have been, too, in the air and water and the chill of the winter night all those years ago in Judea and Galilee, when Herod danced with his puppet masters and Roman soldiers watched with suspicion as the people eked out a barebones living. What chills must Mary have felt when all that stood between her and certain ruin were the words of an angel and the dream of her betrothed. And even then the darkness was certain: This new life stirring in her womb was sure to be trouble. Herod would brook no rival, and Rome would tolerate no challenge to the status quo.

To imagine God stirring in the darkness of her womb must have been as terrifying as it was thrilling and dangerous. To be a peasant from a small town few knew bearing a promise that was too hopeful for so many, too hopeful to be more than whispered about in close company… Well, who could possibly imagine any of it? And yet it inspired Mary to speak of a world where winners are losers and losers winners. Maybe she was turned so upside down with this stirring in the darkness, she could not help but see it invite the utter overturn of the world about her.

Who do we imagine might stir in our darkness of today, and dare we imagine anyone or anything stir in the dark in this age of cynical doubt, of narrow materialism, of perpetual war and angst? Is the Virgin’s womb barren in our time, so much so that we must shut our borders and cast suspicion within? So much so that we ignore the plight of teeming refugees, of a world run mad with suffering?  So barren that we must be convinced that the gracious years are gone and now we are to grasp in the dark, scrambling over each other for only scraps in the waning days of empire?

We want strongmen to arise and lead us out of the dark. But we who pause and reflect long enough remember in our bones that strongmen are only part of the darkness themselves. They brood, posture, and bellow like Tolkien’s dragons. They threaten and menace with power and its seductive promises. They cast about for enemies and blame, point fingers, and count might and perhaps count the heads of those who oppose them for a coming purge. This is not the stirring of a baby as it quickens in the womb, with innocence and hope. This is only the stirring of the old games of war, politics, states, wealth, and domination.

Who then shall stir in this darkness and prepare, prepare for a joy that is too wonderful to imagine and too subversive to be disclosed? Where would Herod and Rome be if suddenly their military might and posturing was shown to be only a cruel illusion, a self-perpetuating myth? What if the hope were so great that fear no longer roiled our body politic and people turned away from desiring the power to cast death and instead turned to offering only life and love? Terror would then have no claim on us, no haven in our hearts anymore.

But this is precisely the promise of Advent: someone stirring in the darkness, preparing for a joy even in the depths of a world’s winter. John the Baptist was not out to overthrow empire or even the king who wanted the prophet dead. No, someone was stirring in the darkness, he said, someone who would change everything. And change it forever. He had met that someone only once, and even then, it had been while in the darkness of his own mother’s womb. That Someone had come close enough to be felt yet unseen, perceived in ways that were beyond sight or sound or explanation. And in that moment, John had leapt for joy and made his mother cry out with wonder. And so now, too, a grown man stands in the Jordan, peering into the darkness of his people, looking for that Someone stirring yet again.

The prophet peers into each of us, looking for that Someone stirring in the wombs of our hearts, stirring in our relationships, even stirring in that poisonous place we call the body politic: stirring in the darkness of this winter night and every night; quickening, and waiting to be born, to birth joy into our midst, with light, with hope, with love.

Richard Edward Helmer, BSG

A reflection for the Silent Days of Advent

The Bishop’s Ranch, Healdsburg, California

December 17, 2015

Lessons of a Not-So-Clever Priest

After nearly thirteen years serving as a priest in The Episcopal Church, I’ve learned a few things the old-fashioned way:

1. Nobody really cares about your professional credentials or seminary education, and everybody has an opinion about how you should be doing your “job.” Live with it.

2. You can crack jokes in sermons, meetings, and cocktail parties, and be the cleverest priest they ever met. You can be the best preacher and teacher in the world and the most erudite theologian and liturgist on the corner. But what they really want to know is, “Do you love us?”

3. Don’t expect anything to really happen until: a) someone is offering decent liturgy and preaching on a regular basis; b) people’s basic pastoral care needs are being met; and c) the parish’s administrative affairs are in order and are competently managed. If you can’t accomplish this yourself, find the help to make it happen, and don’t work on anything else until you do.

4. Politics, housing, and church life are truly all local. Don’t get caught up too much in the news about the wider church or its demise. When most of the people we serve hear “church” they think first and foremost of the congregation where they are a member.

5. Never put full credence in either your harshest critics or your greatest fans. Both change their minds on a dime, and both will lead you down blind paths if you let them.

6. There’s a lot of talk about “leadership” in the Church these days. Much of it is egotistical baloney. It’s always a good idea to shut up and listen. It’s also a good idea to authentically tend to your own faith journey and prayer life. Most real leadership flows from there.

7. Be curious about the people you serve. This is not about you.

8. Knowing your limits is just as important as knowing your power and responsibilities -- perhaps even more so.

9. Never go it alone, and always check your own counsel with people you trust.

10. Be courageous enough to make mistakes and humble enough to apologize for them.

11. Bullies need the same thing you do: honesty and accountability. Cultivate both.

12. The Church generally moves slower than molasses in Vermont in January before climate change. Learn to be patient.

13. The Church is not primarily a social service agency. Nor is it a mere sacramental grocery store. Never forget that Christ is at work here, somewhere, despite the best and worst you bring to bear. For this priest, that recognition is often Gospel.

That Not-So-Sweet Jesus

A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent, Year B
Delivered at Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, California on March 1st, 2015

Readings

Audio

Where did we decide that Jesus was sweet, kind, and gentle, and why? Maybe it has something to do with attempting to make the gospel stories (and the Bible generally) palatable for protected, young ears and tender imaginations. Maybe it has something to do with our habitual domestication and institutionalization of religion. That makes some sense – we institutionalize people deemed unruly, so why not scripture and Jesus, too?

It is easy to imagine and depict Jesus, blue-eyed and blond-haired no less, surrounded by laughing children, smiling platonically and knowingly that all will be well. Except that is our conceit, not scripture’s. Nor is it Jesus’.

Jesus was a frustrated man. And he was Semitic, not Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon, which meant he grew up in a culture where passions were at the surface of everyday life and relationships. And he was Mediterranean, which meant there was yelling in public and it mattered how you play verbal hardball, most of all with your opponents.

Perhaps most importantly for our gospel today, Jesus’ understanding of hatred was indifference, not wanton cruelty. And that meant his understanding of love meant engagement, reproof, and disclosure of the heart. And the heart for him was not a demurring, individualistic secretive seat of emotion, but an openly relational, communal dynamic of passion, thought, and conviction wrapped and delivered in action. For Jesus, there was no love at a distance. There was only love up close, personal, and, indeed, political.

So Peter gets an earful today, not for being evil, but for being errant and dense. And you can’t blame Peter. He’s feeling bold. He just got it right for a change, identifying Jesus first as the Messiah. And he knows what “Messiah” means. It means a political savior who will throw out the Romans and restore the kingdom of Israel to its former glory under David’s son. Maybe Peter is imagining a few divine things, too, but his Messiah is grounded in reality and is supposed to bring about some practical political change and honor to all of Judea, Galilee, and the people of God everywhere. And Peter has just witnessed Jesus feeding the multitudes, putting the religious authorities in their place and healing the blind. So what is Jesus talking about? All this nonsense about going to Jerusalem and being arrested and killed. Peter likely can’t hear much past that. Who needs a dead King? Or a dead Messiah for that matter? So, of course, he will rebuke his Rabbi, Master, and friend.

And Jesus’ counter-rebuke will be all the more stinging, but not because he calls Peter a “Satan,” which simply means “tempter.” But because Peter has just stumbled into yet another, even more disturbing truth:

The Messiah he thought he signed up for is not the Messiah he is getting.

We all know this feeling. The perfect house turned out to be mold-ridden or needs a major foundation repair. The perfect church just turned out to have everything all communities have: bad history, gossips, and skeletons lurking in dark places. The perfect job is tarnished by a grumpy boss, an incompetent co-worker, or the unexpected drudgery of paperwork. The perfect friend just stabbed us in the back. The spouse we thought we married has edges we didn’t know about and didn’t learn about until the wedding was over, the honeymoon was behind us, the bills were all piled up, and all of life with its bumps and windy roads lay ahead.

Love, we all learn again today along with Peter, is a choice. It isn’t the romantic confluence of perfect circumstances and emotions. Faith, we learn with him, is also a choice. It isn’t just a nice daisy chain of inspired moments.

And pain, we all try to learn along with Peter, is an inevitable part of love and faith. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

And life, particularly Life with a capital “L” — that Life with God, the author of creation and all true love — happens only one way: cheek-by-jowl with death.

The Kingdom Jesus has been talking about has, at least at first glance, surprisingly little to do with the stories about King David’s slaying Goliath with a sling and stone, or the glorious expansion of his mature kingdom. The Kingdom Jesus has been talking about is so fragile that it must die before it can live. And it is not made of stone walls and fortresses, but dry-rotted wood shaped into crosses. And it is not found at the heart of Jerusalem in the beauty of the Solomonic Temple, but outside the city on a bare hill where the criminals go to die.

Jesus tells his disciples and us — if we will but set aside our kindly, gentle, but largely harmless depiction of our Savior — that we must face our darkness in order to find light. We must see our imperfections if we are to be perfected by God’s love for us. We must confront death’s designs if we are to embrace life. And the Kingdom of God, that frustrated kingdom that still yearns to be born even now in the real lives of the suffering and the lonely, the fearful and the marginalized, is born on the sweaty, hard work of carrying crosses, both ours and those of others.

Richard Rohr talks about “necessary suffering,” the inevitable hard knocks of life that every human being experiences simply by breathing and being in relationship. There is suffering delivered by oppression, by evil, by negligence, and we can police that to a degree. But necessary suffering is as inevitable as old age. Peter, like us, would avoid that if he could.

But the command of Jesus to Peter and to us is to get behind him. The command is to get real. The command is to join the struggle and dispense with the selfish delusions of immortal youth, political glory, and the superficial salves of creature comforts. These are the temptations Jesus confronted in the wilderness. No wonder Peter’s oblique appeal to them equates him in Jesus’ mind with Satan.

No, God’s Kingdom is more radical than Peter imagines, more fragile than he wants to know, and yet — like that sacred covenant God made with Abraham — more consequential for the ages and peoples near and far than he can begin to realize. Yet it is remarkable that Peter, stung as he is, doesn’t leave Jesus at this juncture.

Maybe he recognizes a glimmer of hope in Jesus’ words, or at least a glimpse of deeper truth than he has yet to understand. The difficult, frustrating, winding road ahead is one of love, truth, compassion, and true justice: those divine gifts the world cannot commodify or control, and so it often ignores or marginalizes them. And sometimes it kills them. As it killed the prophets of old and as it kills the prophets of today.

Lent is about walking with Peter and following that road anyway. . . and trusting in a God who has whispered or perhaps just hinted in Peter’s heart and ours, too, that the path ahead could conquer even death itself.

Vexed by the Journey

Little vexed me more as an aspiring, struggling pianist many years ago than a trusted friend — also a musician — telling me to learn to “enjoy the journey.” It’s taken me nearly twenty years to even begin to grasp what he meant, noting my temptation towards quick fixes, thinking more often about arrivals, and craving a predictable stability in daily life that is worse than unachievable. It is entirely unrealistic. Worst of all, it is just another pet idol of mine.

Which brings me, of course, to the institutional church, from which we all benefit as we sit here this morning in the beautiful confines of St. George’s Chapel at the Bishop’s Ranch, bathed in a most blessed rain slowly eroding a long drought. How on earth — building on millennia of tradition with roots in Benedictine and desert spirituality along with Roman bean-counting governance and parochial proclivities — did we get the idea that Christianity should be institutional? At the very best, I suppose, we might say we need a vessel — and we might imagine that in the naval sense of the word — to help us sustain our essential needs while we attend to the inevitable spiritual journey of the inner and relational life. But I, as a parish priest and veritable church governance junkie, encounter too often the severe limitations of institutional Christianity, and I cannot quite convince myself.

This time of year, we remember a young woman, probably barely into her teens, literally bearing Christ not in the comfort of her own home in Nazareth with supportive, familiar faces and hands tending to her, but somewhere on the road outside of Bethlehem, in the midst of strangers. According to Luke’s account, at least, as a Galilean Jew, she had entered the somewhat foreign and hostile domain of her ancestral Judea with her betrothed, knowing full well she would bear her child, begotten under most dubious circumstances, while en route. I can only imagine what my wife might have said to me, in those interminable weeks leading up to the birth of one of our children, had I told her we were going on a long journey, and we would not be home before labor. There are probably more than a few suitable Japanese expressions for husbands spouting clueless ideas!

Yet Mary, the Godbearer, almost never has any significant interaction with Jesus in the gospels unless they are somewhere other than home. There is that precious glimpse of Jesus’ teenage years while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he incurs Mary’s fury for worrying her when he lingers behind in the Temple. There is that argument in a kitchen in Capernaum over a wedding party running out of wine. And there is, of course, that image of Mary with her suffering son about as far from home as they might imagine ever being: on a hill called Golgotha.

“Madonna of the Bamboo Grove” from Four Japanese Madonnas, an online collection curated by The University of Dayton

Mary has been called the first Christian, and I suppose it is not just for her willingness to physically bear the Son of God. It is for her willingness to journey with him into the strange, unexpected, and even terrifying; carrying him at times even into the loneliness of a stable with only the company of a somewhat mystified but stalwart Joseph and a handful of stinky animals and shepherds; or receiving her son’s body in that most poignant station of death on Good Friday.

Our predilection to reify Mary may at times obscure her witness to what it means to be truly Christian. It is not simply a matter of sitting in comfort, as we can this time of year, and sing Veni Emmanuel, unless we mean it like an expectant mother in the midst of labor. Nor is it simply a matter of hanging out for the Second Coming in the beauty of our institutional churches, unless we expect that coming to mean not one beloved stone being left upon another. The only stability we are meant to cultivate is that radical trust in the promises of God. Institutions, comforts, and even homes come and go. They can be as fleeting as a long-practiced piece of music, the fading tones of a performance, or the echoes of applause.

The Christian life is like Mary’s, after all, uncomfortable and dusty on the road, with no room at the Inn and unexpected meetings with total strangers, and the comforts and faces of home only a wistful memory. Our idolatry of stability, of sitting comfortably on the laurels of our accomplishments and conquests, explains a great many things wrong with our civilization today and across the ages. Journeys are powerfully vulnerable moments in our lives, but also the most profoundly real as we are exposed to the elements and uncertainties of a capricious universe. And so it is there that Christ comes – sometimes to us, but more often because we carry him and give birth to him there. It is there we also vent our fury at his mystifying talk about God and something he calls a kingdom. We, too, are vexed by his wandering ways and upside-down teachings. . . and we sometimes find ourselves receiving his body after the world has had its way with him and our journey — along with his — seems to have reached an abrupt end.

I suppose my greatest struggle with music and journeys all those years ago was with the “dirty laundry” of missed notes and frustratingly difficult passages and the lonely hours trying to master an instrument, a phrase, a chord, and, above all, myself. The truth of my friend’s counsel was that there was no short-circuiting, no circumventing that process. And then my even harder learning was to value that long journey when at last I would push a piece out in front of an audience, knowing even then that it might fail or I might fall to pieces in a pile of nerves. But that, too, is the journey of the true Gospel, the true Church, and all of us when we are sometimes approaching what we might call true Christianity. No amount of institutional comfort can save us from the journey we must undertake in this pregnant time. No amount of bean counting and careful preparation can forestall or circumvent the dangerous, uncertain, and sometimes seemingly endless labor of pushing Christ out into the world.

But as vexing as that is at times, it is our calling. And we, like Mary, undertake the journey risking a radical faith in the whispers of angels and the ephemera of dreams. I still take no comfort in clichés like “the journey is the destination.” But then, who said I am to be comfortable? This late in Advent is an ironic call to discomfort (“Comfort, comfort ye my people”), because nothing new comes without upsetting the old and the known, and until we learn to leave our idols at home and carry the living God with us on the road of life, we will not know our salvation.

Ferguson, Staten Island, and Advent

One lesson of the last few weeks I have tried to take very much to heart:

We must learn in this country how to better acknowledge our privilege.

This is not about “white guilt,” which is simply a mode of hiding our power behind a selfish facade of shame — a most insidious liberal piety!

Nor is this about mere “personal responsibility” — that hideous idol of the right that is blind to all the ways oppression is sustained systemically in our common culture.

No, this is about stepping back far enough to see how the simple accident of birth clothes us in undeserved power and rights over others.

And how by seeing, then, we might be offered a choice in the shared future we are willing to pursue alongside all of our sisters and brothers.

Prelude

Among my first attempts at studying Rachmaninov, recorded this afternoon while practicing at church. . .

Lots of voicing, many choices, and an almost endless sea of detail:

Prelude in D Major, Op. 23, No. 4

Love, Ludwig

Ludwig van Beethoven:

Der Kuß (The Kiss), Op. 128 (c. 1798)
Poetry by Christian Felix Weisse (1726–1804)

Adelaide, Op. 46 (c. 1796) 
Poetry by Friedrich von Matthisson (1761-1831)

Steve Beecroft, Tenor
Richard Edward Helmer, Piano

Recorded live at The Redwoods Auditorium
Mill Valley, California
May 13, 2014

Songs of Travel

Songs of Travel by Ralph Vaughan Williams
poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson
Steve Beecroft, Tenor
Richard Edward Helmer, Piano

The Vagabond
Let Beauty Awake
The Roadside Fire
Youth and Love
In Dreams
The Infinite Shining Heavens
Whither must I Wander
Bright is the Ring of Words
I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope

Recorded live at The Redwoods Auditorium
Mill Valley, California
May 13, 2014

To Clara from Johannes

Here is my rendition of Brahms' Theme and Variations in D Minor, his own transcription for piano of the second movement of the String Sextet in B-flat, Op. 18. In 1860, he offered this as a birthday gift to Clara Schumann, concert pianist and life-long friend. The work was not published until 1927.

A sextet has six voices (more if the strings are playing chords).
I was given only two hands.
Definitely a study in transcriptions!

Recorded live at The Redwoods Auditorium, Mill Valley, California
May 13th, 2014

Easter Incongruity

Sermon notes for Easter, 2014.

Nearly fifteen years ago this autumn, my wife and I both arrived in the Bay Area within weeks of each other from two very different parts of the world. But it didn’t matter if you came from western Japan or the American heartland: the Bay Area was just as expensive and roiling with newcomers scrambling all over each other to get it while the getting was good. Some of you will remember the dot com bubble, and perhaps some of you, like me, find our current milieu eerily similar.

It seems we live again in a familiarly cynical, self-absorbed time. Business-as-usual involves 101 turning into a parking lot twice a day, sky-rocketing housing prices, old neighborhoods being rapidly gentrified by bidding wars, and an almost palpable feeling that you’d better get yours while the getting’s good.

It always strikes me during Holy Week and into Easter how incongruous, how out-of-step our observance of these high holiest days of the Christian year appear against the backdrop of Southern Marin and the wider Bay Area. And this year felt conspicuously incongruous, as stopping for time only to think about where we are headed and why might just lose us the race. Even more would stopping from business-as-usual long enough to think about a God who dared to risk everything for us – even death on a cross.

To paraphrase another passage of Christian scripture, the cross is foolishness to the world. Resurrection more so. A society of winners and losers depends on the certainty of death and a kind of inevitability for the victors. That is how the world is built and maintained. Even if we don’t always see it, we feel it in our exhaustion and uneasiness with the present time and how it distracts us from the warmth and beauty of a spring day, or the scents of the flowers, or dulls and anesthetizes us from the pain and wonder of those priceless gifts the world has not yet invented a way to commoditize: love, generosity, and compassion.

And yet we are here. Like Jesus’ first disciples at the tomb.

Those first followers gathered at Jesus’ tomb must have also felt – to the core of their being – the sudden incongruity of their lives with business-as-usual. Business-as-usual meant the Sabbath in Jerusalem was over, and much of the population was back at work for a new week. The religious authorities were poring over their latest dust-up with a charismatic pretender who had threatened both their tightly held traditions and their fragile economic/political agreement with the Roman occupation. But fragile as it was, they had come to rely on it for their prestige and power. And with the death of Jesus and the dispersion of his followers, that fragile alliance would hold. Pilate, governor of the occupation, and the garrisons under him had just executed another criminal and rabble-rouser: probably one of many during his tenure. Crucifixion was always a handy way to frighten and shame the locals into line and get rid of threats to the Pax Romana at the same time. So the tribute to Rome from this dusty, irascible, little country in the backwaters of empire would keep flowing for the foreseeable future. The Roman occupation could start a new week resting on its laurels that the drama of the weekend was satisfactorily resolved. They had done their jobs, and business could go on as usual.

But not so for the disciples at the tomb. They had planted their lives in a different garden, in an economic and sociological dead-end, a graveyard far outside the halls of power – about as far away as you could get. Jesus had taught them not to base their lives, their essence and hearts, on the rat race as they had known it. And much good that did them. Now they were far beyond the reach of the comfort of business-as-usual, stuck with a dead teacher, prophet, rabbi, and friend. And who needs a dead Messiah? They didn’t. And even if they had the imagination and savvy to turn him into a political martyr, his closest supporters and friends were scattered in fear, with no political alliances to leverage with any effect. In the tomb with Jesus was the dead barest beginnings of a revolution called “the kingdom of God.” The kingdoms of the world had defeated the Jesus revolution, cutting it down even before it had a chance to fully take root, crushing it under the heel of human empire, the well-practiced art of manipulating the mob, and the weighty, inevitable structures of economic and military hegemony.

And so imagine their surprise when they find the tomb empty, the stone rolled away!

When Mary Magdalene encounters the Risen Christ, how can she but mistake him as the gardener? That would be business-as-usual: the only expected stranger we might encounter in the company of the tombs and the dead.

It will take her, and Jesus’ other followers, a moment—or more than a few – for them to perceive the Risen Christ. And it will take a whole community to help us realize what the resurrection means…

God in the Risen Christ tells us it will no longer be business-as-usual. Something fundamental has changed, and God has broken into the world, rolling away the stones of tombs and ushering new life for the dead. The race the world offers is unmasked and emptied of its power over us. We are offered a different kind of life: one not rooted in fear, death, and competition of a cynical and self-absorbed age. Instead we are offered a life that conquers fear and death with abiding compassion, love for others, and unimaginable grace. So the question for us this Easter, then, is this:

Will we decide to continue business-as-usual? Or will we look where the women of the Gospel looked: into the margins, the graveyards, the dead ends of our lives and souls and those of others? Perhaps the incongruity of the broken bread and the common cup will awaken us this Easter to discover Christ rising to new life, the Jesus revolution arising again among us. Perhaps we will uncover our calling again as Christians to “turn the whole world upside down” in ways the world cannot understand, recognize, nor ably oppose.

The weapons of the Jesus revolution, after all, are not fear, guns and steel; nor are they venture capital, hedge funds, and technological innovation.  They are instead compassion, generosity, forbearance, forgiveness, and that wild peace in the face of death that resurrection engenders: a peace that signals our freedom from the final tool the world employs against us, death itself. And these priceless Easter virtues are here for the taking. Will you take them up again?

We remember today this promise: we are first and foremost an Easter people. This world will pass away, just as did the Roman Empire and many kingdoms since. Jesus lives forever. And so, then, might our truest selves born anew in him: our Easter selves, fresh as the spring, fragrant as the flowers, powerful as the seasons, and given as new life for everyone.

The Good Friday Project

Sermon Notes – Good Friday, 2014

Good Fridays were always busy for my family. As a high schooler, I remember hearing the passion according to John’s gospel in our little mission church, and then driving up the road from McPherson, Kansas, to Lindsborg, where my parents and I would play in the annual performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. It was, at one level, my first acquaintance with the distinctions between two biblical renditions of the passion narrative. It was, at another level, finding a way to really begin to grapple with the texts at the very heart of our religious tradition. As a youth, Bach’s musical treatment of the passion always moved me, as he would capture the emotion of each verse and repeat it in glorious counterpoint passing between orchestral sections and the double choir. . . until its meaning sank into the very depths of the soul. It was, you might say, a striking example of eighteenth-century lectio divina.

I remember my first Good Friday without playing in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion as a capstone, and how empty I felt without it. Recovering a sense of deep engagement with the passion narrative then became part of my struggle to grow up spiritually, to grow up in faith.

Richard Rohr argues, “All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. . . Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust.”

Good Friday is precisely about all these things, and no amount of theology seems to get us beyond the absurd, tragic, the nonsensical, and the unjust nature of the passion. And yet, it is tempting as we have often done in the Western Church: to simply project all of that onto Jesus, call it redemptive, and then go home. But that, we all learn sooner or later, is not enough.

One of the great steps in my own journey was to reflect in recent years with my spiritual director on my own pain and suffering. At a critical point in that conversation, I finally said out loud – with more than a little trepidation after years of ordained ministry – that I had learned my pain and suffering were nothing compared with others’.

“Yes,” he replied, “but it is still your suffering and pain.” No one else’s. Just as much in need of redemption as anyone else’s. And no amount of undertaking the odious task of comparing my suffering with others’, or denying it, or looking for the right pill – spiritual or otherwise – to take it all away would accomplish that.

Until we are ready and willing to see the cross as God’s identification with our own suffering, individual and shared, we will not get past treating Jesus as only a mere scapegoat, only a cosmic carrier of our sins. Jesus’ suffering, much as we often misapprehend our own prayers and theology, is not a simple substitute for ours. Good Friday always ran the risk of turning into an abstraction for me: the next step in completing a theological formula that would perhaps end all my heartache and pain. But reality ultimately confronts and challenges our abstract notions about salvation. Most of us learn through the trials of experience that no matter how much we focus on Jesus’ suffering or think about it, it doesn’t take away our own. I often wonder if this isn’t an unspoken reason that many people leave the church or abandon Christianity all together. At our worst moments, the Church has sometimes behaved no better than snake oil salesmen, promising relief if you buy the mythical magic formula.

But we must learn that Jesus’ suffering is not some great cosmic talisman to ward off our pain. And the Church is not a simple pharmacy where we pick up our medicine and then go home and follow the prescription.

No, Christ’s suffering faces and transforms ours. In the old language, his redeems ours. His takes on the absurdity, tragedy, nonsense, and the injustice of our lives and makes it – sometimes with great endurance and sweat – all something holy. Through the cross, he takes the awful pain and messiness of this life and infuses it with meaning, purpose, and transformational power. And if we let the cross do this work in our lives, it not only transforms us, but turns us into true Christians, ready to help transform the pain and suffering of others. That is what we might call the project of Good Friday – a project that begins with Jesus, and into which each of us is called. We have been, of course, very much like the disciples, running away in fear and denial. And yet the cross remains: our invitation to become part of the mighty salvific act that God is offering all of humanity in Christ.

As a healthy religion, our tradition of the cross encourages us to offer our pain to God. Sometimes it will be relieved. Sometimes it will remain. But either way, the promise is that it will be transformed into grace for us. As a great religion, our tradition of the cross offers us a pathway to transform the suffering of others as well. Sometimes we will be able to relieve that suffering. Sometimes we will not. But either way, the cross calls us into the transformative acts of compassion that end the loneliness that suffering engenders. We then carry it together, lightening the load for one another. And God in Christ carries all of us together.

In that way, we see that our suffering is shared, and ultimately made holy. In that, we partake in God’s sharing with us in Christ, broken in the bread, poured out in the common cup. All that has blighted our life, then, is re-purposed for redemption. Our suffering is like Jesus’, and his like ours: offered out of love rather than resisted or denied in fear. And our life, like Jesus’, becomes an offering poured out for all the needs of others.

Recovering a deep engagement with the passion narratives for me began with recovering a fuller sense of my own pain and suffering, my need to see that redeemed, and my choosing to actively participate in that redemption. And that is where we all begin again together on Good Friday: at the cross, with the suffering of Christ identifying with our own, remembering our place on the cross with him, and seeing in his eyes our own reflected back. . . and through them, a God who loves us so earnestly that no part of us is beyond the renewing, life-giving touch of the divine.

Stubborn Salvation

Sermon Notes for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A

Readings

Most of us gingerly dip our toes in the waters of faith through hope. I hope there is more than this life. I hope the virtues like love and fidelity are worth it. I hope death is not the end. Hope is given as a Christian virtue, of course, but I find it somewhat remarkable that I can’t come up with a single verse in any of the gospels that Jesus commands us to hope. It’s only a word that appears in his absence or expected presence.

And so we come to another of the great “I am” statements in John this day – John’s rewriting of the familiar and ancient Torah, beginning with the creation narrative, disclosing as he did to us last week that by working in Jesus, God has not yet arrived at the seventh day sabbath rest… and this day recounting another play on the “I am” of the burning bush, the divine disclosure of being both primordial and eternal, both transcendent and imminent, both wholly other and fully present.

The focus is on the stinking tomb of Lazarus, that festering wasteland of death that haunts so many of our worst fears and wrecked dreams. John does not hesitate to ladle every possible oppositional force into the story, reminding us that Christ, the Word of God’s great “I am…” is up against every conceivable human obstacle.

On discussing making the journey to Judea, the disciples are rightly worried their teacher is walking into the inevitable, deadly trap of the religious and Roman authorities in the Jerusalem orbit. Thomas, ever the realist bordering on cynicism, offers resigning snark worthy of twenty-first century:

“Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

John must want us to feel the inevitability in this story we all feel about the finalities of this life, the surrender to forces beyond our control, the undeniable reality of our suffering and the press of death.

Mary is too grief-stricken to greet her friend and savior. Martha, the more pragmatic of the two sisters meets Jesus with a thinly veiled accusation:

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died…”

followed by a thin sliver of hope:

“But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”

But when Jesus offers unwavering assurance that her brother will rise again, Martha retreats to an abstraction about the resurrection of the dead on the last day, somewhere off in a murky future where hope for a struggling life might find some projected justification. The present suffering of loss –a brother, breadwinner, and kin companion in life’s brief journey gone – is just too much for hope to bear.

And so it is for Jesus when he arrives at the tomb and weeps with his companions. John compels us to consider a God who does not will our suffering or plan it to test us or use it to punish us, but rather who enters into it with us. This is a dangerous God who is not manipulated by clever prayers or incantations or pleased by the bribes of priests or even by our most righteous piety. This is a God who suffers with us, sheds tears, breaks with our hearts, and feels the gnawing reality of our finitude. This is a God who knows our limited vision, the real humility of our impotence, and the uncertainties that grind away at even the most vibrant faith.

This is a God who risks all danger to be with us at the very end, in the dark and bitter deaths we all inevitable experience.

And, a bit like Ezekiel, Jesus, when confronted with the undeniably dead and dry bones of every broken dream, promise, and ended life, does not respond to the question, “Can these bones live?” with a tepid “I hope so.”

Hope is not enough, at least not as we understand it these days as a shrug in the face of all human limitation. Instead, Christ, like Ezekiel, surrenders to the sublime power of the Creator: “Oh, Lord God, you know.”

“I am the resurrection and the life,” God in Christ says to a hopeful Martha and to us in the sacraments, at our deathbed, in our suffering, and in our darkest hour of despair. So stubborn is our promised salvation, it will not yield to our tepid hope or our deepest hopelessness. So stubborn is God’s love for us, it will not be confined to platitudes or vague projections about an afterlife. So stubborn is the resurrection that Jesus embodies, we can only respond with the silence of Lazarus as we are raised from our own stinking tombs, and ordered set free by the great I AM.

Choral Evensong

Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, and St. Stephen's, Tiburon-Belvedere, joined choir forces Sunday evening for Evensong, one of the great musical contributions of Anglicanism to the Christian tradition.

Listen now to the full service.

Albert Campbell, director
John Karl Hirten, organist
Richard Edward Helmer, BSG, officiant
The Rev. Rob Gieselmann, homilist
Musical settings by William Smith (Preces) and Thomas Morley
Expectans Expectavi by Charles Wood