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.