Of Darkness and Light

In early religious Rites set at the winter solstice the ancients would gather at night and encircle a fire; they would sing and dance raising their fiery torches towards starry heaven and invite their God to come among them; to empower them to brace against the darkness that closes upon them....invoking God's presence...bidding God to descend again into the fray of life at the darkest time of the year. Indeed we need not look long or far to name the darkness that besets us in our time, as in every time.

This Christmas, set at the winter solstice appropriately, we will continue the practice of the ancients. We will gather around a fiery altar and proclaim God's presence with us in the person of Jesus, a fragile and vulnerable presence...but a presence to be sure. The scribes of the Gospel of John call this presence light...and that the light of Christ is in truth the light of humankind...that is a startling claim....that the light of Christ and the light of the human community are but one light...one light from the same source.

We, as people of faith, people of imaginative conscience, are therefore profoundly implicated in the Incarnation, the enfleshment of God in Christ. Through imaginative and compassionate practice of the faith, the way of Christ, the way of goodness, we are light bearers....bearers of the very fire of God to a darkening world. At Christ's birth the fiery ways of God are born yet again...and we too...we are yet born again into a vocation of light bearing...a vocation of enlightening our world...an unquenchable light vital for the world's salvation...a light by which all flesh will apprehend God's goodness and presence among God's beloved people....and this beautiful radiant light...this light from the source.... this light will cause even the darkness to sing and dance.

Of Singing and Significance

An aged man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick
Unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium. From W.B. Yeats Sailing to Byzantium


According to Augustine of Hippo, and later quoted by Charles Wesley, "One who sings prays twice." The songs and the singing from the Festival of Advent Lessons and Carols this Sunday past are still resonating in my head and heart and soul: the gentle soprano, the mellow alto, the harmonic tenor and sounding bass; each voice become artifice pointing to something or someone near, mysterious and profound.


Yeats the poet is seeking a way to marry the mortality, not just of humankind, but of the creation, to the eternal. His first premise is that it is art that bespeaks the eternal in the midst of a transient life, but the stunning discovery in this poem is that in singing, the singer becomes the artifice, the bearer of the song, and therefore participates in this illusive life eternal. Yeats is re-articulating the romantic high premise that beauty is truth and truth beauty...the means and ends of the eternal.


Indeed singing is a fine metaphor for the life of faith....all of us artisans in the courts of holy Byzantium imagining and building our world, still in its infancy, into what God imagines it to be. If the editors of Genesis had been paying closer attention when they wrote and rewrote the stories of creation, they might have been careful to note that God didn't just speak the world into being; rather the world was sung into being....the singing voice of God begetting the graceful rhythm and harmony of the universe...God's song moving over the face of the deep, ordering the world into a significant ineffable beauty...and we, heirs of the same song, still singing the same song....the song from the source...the song that moves the spheres of the universe entire...the song that will resonate in heaven and earth, the one Soul, forever....and its name among many names is love...love palpable and audible...love that transforms and saves and creates...love that redeems the tatters of the mortal dress of all ways and all things... So even if you think you can't sing...for God's sake sing.

Of Heaven's Advent

The great German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, makes the assertion that the Christian faith and life is a perpetual Advent, that we live in an eschatological tension between a certain hope of God's saving presence, and God's final consummation of heaven and earth, a time when God will be "all in all." I want to suggest that Moltmann's premillennialist sensibilities get the best of him. Premillennialism is the theology that we all live in a fallen state, in a spiritual winter, as it were, until the rapturous coming of Christ to set all things right; in the meantime we wait in hope for this decidedly future event.

This theology is pervasive in popular western Christianity, and I think it encourages a passive life of faith, a life of faith that only looks to a future manifestation, and we are rendered somewhat powerless by it. This is a predisposition for projecting our responsibilities as people of faith onto an aloof God decidedly absent from creation, or at least most of the time.

I want to offer a different take on the concept of God's Advent. Yes, the Christian faith and life is a perpetual Advent, but this coming is happening as we speak; hope and salvation breaking into present time. "What do you see? " John the Baptiser asks Jesus' would be disciples who wonder whether Jesus is the real deal or not. "We see the sick being healed, the poor being clothed and sheltered and fed; the marginalized dignified; we see justice for the dispossessed and outcast," they answer. (my paraphrase) This coming, this Advent is not just about the coming of Christ, the incarnation of God with us, but this Advent first and foremost is about a way of life breaking into the world, Jesus the archetype for such a life; and the means of this Advent rests with us and all people of faith bearing the life blood of this kingdom of God; we and all people of faith, the new Incarnation, the means of the way of heaven in earth. Advent is about the coming of the Way of Jesus, a way in which we participate with all our heart, and soul, and mind; and when the way of the kingdom of heaven is enacted by the people of God, then the kingdom comes now, and we see it in the flesh, a present, beautiful and glorious reality....We see that even now God is all in all; indwelling God's people....E'en so Lord Jesus, quickly come.

Of Sacred Change

There are many metaphors with which to speak of God. In truth the language of the imagination is the only way to speak of God. The people of the Islamic faith speak of God as having ninety nine names, emblematic of the awareness that we can never definitively speak of the infinite; but we do have tastes of the infinite captured in the common things of earth...all of creation living metaphors onto who God is, and what God is like.

One such metaphor is change. I was taught most of my life that though everything around me changes, God alone is unchanging and unchangeable. I don't believe that anymore. I don't believe it because the created order entire says otherwise. It is all about change, and if the creation is a view onto who God is, and certainly that is the author's point in the Book of Job, then God is all about change: The always poignant succession of the seasons an outward and visible sign; the waning daylight in the Fall; the inspired lengthening of days in the Spring; the ever changing nuanced color of the Delta; birth and death, siblings from the source of the secret of the universe; the crossing over events of our lives; from sacred ground to sacred ground; a cosmic dance of the coming perfection; and God with us in the dance, changing with us; becoming as the created order becomes.

God is now not the same as God once was, nor are we.... and years hence God will have grown as will we....and God calls this sacred process very good...and so shall we.....and the great surprise, ours and our God's, as we move in time and space....the great surprise is....well it's a surprise.

Of Peril and Dignity

While singing Melita (also known as the "Navy" hymn #608) this past Sunday I was so choked up with emotion I could hardly get the words out. Over the years I have sung this hymn time and again, but I never really felt the words. I guess I heard it as a militaristic sort of thing. Indeed we pray for our Navy sailors...but this Sunday it was different, larger. Jim Von Dreele had just spoken to us about his mission work in the port of Philadelphia and South Jersey. He told us about the hard lives of seafarers: The many months at sea away from home; the cramped quarters aboard ship; the extremely dangerous work; gales and the ever present possibility of fire aboard; the isolation and emotional stress; the lack of advocacy and the indignity that comes with that; and that 95% of what we consume comes via the shipping industry, and yet they are invisible to us.



He was describing yet another manifestation of the marginalized in our world; the invisible ones just beyond the periphery. In the gospel of Matthew the writer tells us that it is at the margins of existence where God is on the move: among the sick, the poor, the imprisoned, the unbefriended stranger, the dispossessed. It is amid the perilous climes of existence that the Spirit afire saves and dignifies. So we must constantly attend to our peripheral vision. Until the marginalized are brought into view and given the privilege of standing with dignity, the creation entire is a broken sacrament, an obfuscated outward and visible sign of what God imagines the world to be. I hear the words of the Navy hymn now as a prayer for the marginalized of our world; a poem about the Creation, the Cosmos growing into its perfection; an ambiguous process, as ambiguous as the sea...at once the source of life and at once a profound danger....but a process of mysterious beauty; a process within which we apprehend the primordial beauty of creation....beauty the DNA of the universe.....beauty that will find its way into the perilous dark corners of our world...until dignity and peace, healing and wholeness are at last upon the earth.



This is the watery, ambiguous and perilous life of Baptism, and we are all in it together bearing up the invisible ones of our world. It is a life perilous and a life that is life-giving. This is the very process of consecrating our world, making holy that which God calls very good. "O hear us as we cry to thee, for those in peril on the sea."

Racism R.I.P.

November 4th 2008 was perhaps our defining moment as a nation.
Whether one is liberal or conservative; Republican or Democrat, one thing that we can all celebrate in this election is the beginning of the end of racism: the finale of the American Civil War. From the abolition of slavery, Brown versus the Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, now, seemingly against all odds, a majority of white voters have elected a man of African American descent. In just over one hundred and fifty years a people have been elevated from slavery to equality and dignity. The white supremacist paradigm is now shattered, and we now have the opportunity to live into the fecund multiculturalism that is America. We will be the better for it. Jokes about race won’t be told much any more….can’t be. Possibilities and empowerment are now realities for the heretofore dispossessed of our culture. This is a renaissance for America; and what we have been saying about ourselves for three and a half centuries is now becoming true, that all people…all people are created equal…and that is the Gospel truth.

All Saints and All Priests

This past weekend the youth confirmation candidates participated in a two day retreat. Their art project was to make chasubles for themselves. A chasuble is the sleeveless, poncho like garment worn by the celebrant at the Eucharist. In the church of England the one who presides over the Eucharist is call the president. In the United States that word has obvious baggage, so the authors of our Book of Common Prayer call the presider in the Episcopal Church the celebrant. But aren't chasubles only worn by priests? Hebrew scripture speaks of the people of Israel as a royal priesthood; a holy nation. St. Paul speaks of the priesthood of all believers.



In the early church of the second century chasubles were worn by each person, men and women, in the Eucharistic assembly. The priest, originally called presbyter, which in Greek means wise elder, would be the one set apart to preside, preach and teach; someone has to do it; but the point to be made here is that the assembly gathered is the celebrant. It is the assembly that consecrates the bread and the wine; the bread and wine symbols of our very lives and labor, transformed at our behest into the body and blood of Christ, a profound symbol as well of a shared life of sacrifice for the nurture of our world....we now body and blood given for the world's sake.



In as much as we, the people of God, are predisposed to live a life of loving sacrifice, we are all priests, all saints...all windows onto the nature of God Godself. It was moving to see the ardor with which our youth gave themselves to this project, and moving to see them proudly wearing the vesture of priesthood in the service this past Sunday. Perhaps they already had an instinctive understanding of their true nature; their true calling. I won't forget it, and neither will they. Some of our youth one day will actually be ordained to the priesthood, but they will be one among peers....peers of the promise....peers whose only work is to consecrate the world...re-imagining the world into the way God intends it....a royal priesthood, a holy people...bearers of God's very life....royal vesture indeed.

Loving God and Loving Neighbor

In our Gospel reading from Matthew this coming Sunday, Jesus, in his debate with the Jewish elders and authorities, lays bare the truth of the matter. He lays aside his parabolic teaching and practices a little "straight talk." The pharisees ask Jesus which commandment in Torah is the greatest. We of course know that there are not just ten commandments, but hundreds in the book of Leviticus. So Jesus is asked to show preference for one commandment over another. Instead, Jesus summarizes the whole of the Jewish law into one mantra, cuts to the chase: Love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and just as importantly, love your neighbor as yourself. The theological point is that loving neighbor is the same thing as loving God. Later in Matthew in the 25th chapter we will hear Jesus say that as you do to the least of the human family you have done it to me. If one doesn't love one's neighbor then one doesn't love God, so to love neighbor is to love God. There it is, pure and simple.

Salvation then is not about us. It is about our neighbor. The notion of salvation being about whether one goes to heaven or hell or not is a hyper individualist illusion, born of the so-called Enlightenment. If the God we worship is love then God surely is drawing all things to Godself....nothing condemned or lost, all things loved and cherished. Augustine of Hippo got it wrong when he argued that the beloved of God were a select few, and that the rest would be cast off as ballast. Our God is a God who includes all, the righteous and sinner alike. Let's take the heaven or hell thing off of our worry list. Salvation is about loving our neighbor. As Jesus says, loving neighbor is the same as loving God, and the whole of scripture attests to this sacred reality.

The life of faith then is about love set loose in the world; love alive amid the dark corners of our world; love alive as salvation among the marginalized and dispossessed, our sacred neighbor. The church, the gathering of the people of faith, the people of conscience, is but a staging ground from which we go out as incarnate salvation for the world. We are reminded in the whole of scripture what this love looks like. It looks like feeding and healing. it looks like nonviolence. It looks like kindness and compassion and warm hospitality; it looks like nurture and empowerment of the weak. It looks like justice and dignity for the lost of our world. And the great mystery is that in living this life of love for our neighbor...there is where true happiness and fulfillment are found. Love God as you love neighbor and all manner of thing shall be well. Pure and simple and profound...the whole of the Law and Prophets indeed.

Of Faith and Worth

The idea of net worth is fluent in our culture. I, like many of you, have had to pay attention to our falling net worth over the past weeks; wondering when the bleeding will stop; fearing what the future holds. I've been wishing for Alan Greenspan to return to the helm of the Federal Reserve, but, alas, pundits are blaming him along with everyone else for the complicated mess we are in. So and so is worth x dollars we say....now so and so is worth x dollars less some thirty percent plus. I think it is true in our culture that a person's value is mostly related to how much money they have: Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Donald Trump, icons of the American dream...icons of worth. It is said that Dale Carnegie, another such icon, spent an inordinate amount of time fearing he would lose his wealth. I don't think he is alone.

We were taught at our recent clergy conference that the Gospels hold up for us two types of power: power that seeks to hold onto itself at all costs, and power that seeks to give itself away. The former breeds fear and violence, while the latter engenders liberation and joy. I think the culture teaches us to hoard for ourselves our wealth and therefore our power. Self interest the pervading rubric of our common life. That is why we live in a proverbial orange alert most of the time, a predisposition of fear. It seems so much of our life and times is continually being subverted by fear, sometimes explicitly, but perhaps more dangerously, subtly and subterranean.

The way of the Gospels stands against this deathly manner of life. The Gospels declare that there is enough, that wealth and therefore power can and must be shared. The Gospels stand for the empowerment of all people...and yet there is still enough...twelve baskets left over we are told in the feeding parables...We will never solve any of our problems, or any of the world's problems via the means of fear and violence. The world will be transformed by people and nations serving the common interest of all, the greater good of the whole. "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." This isn't a vacuous sentimentality, but the secret of the world's transformation. Faith is enlightened doing, and I am convinced that it is the role of the people of faith, people of conscience, people of the way of Christ to model this life for the good of the whole...a sacred leaven of sacrifice that will in truth cast out fear and raise the dead of our world to new life. Resurrection is about the empowerment of the disempowered in the here and now. So let us as people of the Resurrection live into whom God made us to be...people of profound worth...people worthy to stand before our God face to face...and there...there is no fear.

Of God and Nature

One of my favorite books in the Bible is the Book of Job. It kind of keeps the rest of scripture honest. Scholars believe that the story of Job is an ancient one originating in the Semitic oral tradition possibly some several thousand years B.C.E, and probably got written down during the Babylonian captivity wherein Jewish scribes began mastering the art of literary narrative. What makes this story so important is that it stands as a challenge to the pervading theology of Hebrew Scripture; the pervading theology being that of the so-called Deuteronomistic historian. This theology holds that as long as Israel worships the one true God, Yahweh, then Israel will be blessed; if Israel strays from its fidelity to Yahweh then Israel will be cursed. So the life and times of the people Israel totters along a continuum of blessing and curse; God's love and wrath; God quick to forgive and quick to punish.



Then along comes our friend Job. You know the story. Satan and God are having a friendly conversation around the heavenly water cooler (my paraphrase), and God asks Satan if he in his travels in earth has encountered God's servant Job. God tells Satan that there is no more faithful one than he. Satan challenges God that Job would cease being faithful if Job's earthly possessions, his family and his health are taken away. If that happens, Satan says, Job will curse God to God's face. So the game is on and Job, God's faithful servant, is beset with all manner of calamity; and indeed Satan is right, Job, for some thirty five chapters gives God a good cursing, demanding that he see God face to face; challenging the time honored theology that being faithful yields blessing. He the case in point that this theology does not hold true. The underlying question of course is why do good people suffer; why is there suffering and evil in a world that God calls good? Legitimate question....and a faithful question.



And the answer Job receives is what none of us expect. It is as if God is the consummate politician dodging the question posed, and launching off on some irrelevant diatribe. This monologue is by far the most we hear God speak in the whole of scripture, so it's worth our while to pay attention. For the longest time I felt God was dismissing Job with a divine arrogance, but now I don't believe that is the case. Here we have God in a moment of high art , God the poet answering Job's question with all due passion and love. God the artist exulting in God's work....the artifice being the created order, the Cosmos. God gives Job a poem about nature herself....its mystery found in its beauty...."where were you when I made the Leviathan; Do you know when the mountain goats give birth; do you observe the calving of the deer?"...a mysterious and elegant dance between birth and death; of dark and light; of joy and pain...and the whole of it possessing an apprehendable beauty just near...a beauty that saves and satisfies....Job sees the beauty of the created order, the world God loves into being, and he is restored to wholeness. Seeing is believing.



The premise of this ancient story is that we can know God's goodness, but not as theological dogma; we can only know God in mystery, which resides in beauty. God points Job toward the beauty of creation...the Creation, a sacred metaphor as to God's true identity: the rhythm of the estuary; the cycle of the seasons, singing the song of love and life and death and new life...the life of God inhabiting the created order, still in its becoming....we God's people a contingent part of the whole, participating in this divine life...not super nature....but nature herself in her divine fullness...God's answer to Job is to trust the beauty...for all manner of thing shall be made well.

God the Universalist

After church this past Sunday I was approached by a parishioner who said that what I had just preached sounded a lot like universalism, the notion that all people will receive God's salvation no matter what religious affiliation. My answer was that God is indeed a universalist. How could we in good conscience worship a God who would exclude anyone from God's grace and favor. This is an old argument of course, one that has persevered over the centuries. Indeed the colonial Christian evangelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries held as their guiding principle the idea that unless one accepted Jesus Christ as their savior they would be consumed by the fires of hell, hence their zealous urgency to make Christ known to the world. Some crafty theologians softened this idea by proposing that lost souls would have yet another chance to accept Jesus after death, the so-called doctrine of universal explicit opportunity.....what!?

There is ample warrant in scripture that God is indeed a universalist. In Genesis God chooses Israel as God's beloved so that Israel would be a light to all people; Israel a people as catalyst for the world's transformation and restoration. In the Gospel of John we are told that Jesus is the way, but many Christians have interpreted this passage as exclusionary, that unless one believes in Jesus one will not be saved. This is a decidedly modern idea pervasive in our hierarchical culture. The point in John is that for salvation ...(salvation a social, economic and political term...salvation in the ancient mind is akin to "well-being") For salvation to take hold in our world one must practice the way of Christ, and from practice comes belief and trust of this way we are to live.

The point to be made here is that salvation is not about the individual. Salvation is for the world God loves; we the people of faith a part of this glorious process of salvation, not an end but a process, the world still in its becoming, the coming perfection taking root as we speak. No one is saved until all are saved. We must not believe in Jesus as an end unto itself, rather we must believe in the way of Jesus as a way of life. In practicing this manner of living we become the catalysts for change; we become the leaven of goodness which will continue God's project of restoration; we artisans in the very process of creation itself. Wherever the brokenness of the world is being mended there Christ is. Indeed at the heart of the world's great religions is the claim that God's (by any name) goodness is manifested in acts of mercy, compassion, love and sacrifice....would that we all practiced such a faith....and in God's time we, and we means all people of every race and nation and every faith.... will.

Of Death and Beauty

"Death is the mother of beauty" insists Wallace Stevens. I write this as Katharine's father is near death. Things do not seem all that beautiful to me right now. I'm remembering his life, how courtly, how hard he worked, his grand sense of humor, his devotion to his wife, his penchant for things nautical. Fare forward traveler. I remember our nurse telling us when we were young that it is painful to enter this world and it is painful to leave it. She knew a lot about pain, suffering and death. She grew up a daughter of a sharecropper, never had much. Her parents died when she was a teenager. Two of her children died in childbirth. And yet she was always singing about God's goodness, about God loving her as a mother loves her daughter. There was something beyond my horizon that she saw.



Perhaps it is the presence of beauty that enables us to cope with the slings and arrows of life.... suffering an artful contrast whereby we may recognize the beauty of life when we see it... this beauty just near that permeates the created order; but I think it goes deeper than that. Death itself has a beauty...the old passing away always giving way to the new. Death the ultimate symbol of the transience of life, that life is process. If we were to behold the transient as natural in the created order...perhaps there we will apprehend the eternal...For transience is the truth of the matter...and where there is truth there is beauty...Life and death one process...a process of becoming....Our souls and bodies forever becoming within this glorious universe we call the new Eden...an Eden in which easeful death has her rightful place as a part of a larger and profound order.



In death life is changed not ended, we say in our Burial rite....indeed that is literally true. At every death just as with every birth, the universe takes a turn towards its perfection still in the becoming...we all implicated in this grand becoming...our births, our deaths gloriously reveling in God's imaginative handiwork of creating and recreating.....and yes there is pain....and yes there is joy, there living in a mysterious harmony....so these matters of birth and death are the harmonic lines in the same song...a song that moves the spheres of the universe entire....Death the gentle mother making way for new life....a sacred process of transformation, humming with mystery, engendering the consummation of heaven and earth. We shouldn't be afraid.

Of Knowledge and Practice

I was a pre-med student until my first Chemistry test. In fact, my first two years of college were a struggle for me. The transdisciplinary academic requirements for a liberal arts education were demanding (I stole a C in Discreet Math, aptly named I thought) , and I was homesick. But I survived and finally upon entering my junior year I could declare my major; English it would be; so I then fell in love with the richness of the college experience and the world of knowledge: the prose of Melville, Joyce and Faulkner; the poetry of the Romantics; of Hardy, Yeats, Eliot and Auden, and Stevens and Frost and Dickinson, and..... We would stay up late at night and argue with all due passion why Ireland arguably produced the three greatest literary artists of the twentieth century; Yeats for poetry, Joyce for prose, and Shaw for theater. We were awash with all this knowledge, our passions for the world and the world's beauty called into life....And then they made me graduate...and sent me out into the real world wherein no one much cared about the last six lines of The Waste Land, or the meaning of the Sea Eagle in Moby Dick.

And then some twenty five years later a mysterious thing happened. I entered seminary and found again the thrill of learning. New Knowledge in a new discipline. Knowledge/ology....(Logos may be translated: spoken knowledge). Theology (God Knowledge); Christology (Christ knowledge); Ontology (knowledge of being); Eschatology (knowledge of end times) Soteriology (knowledge of salvation) The passionate conversations with class mates come round again after so many years, all of us awash again in the richness of learning about the faith: Its history, its sacramental and interpretive witness. And then they made me graduate and sent me out again.

In all of this I have learned a few things: That to apprehend the truth and beauty of our world and of our faith, one must do the hard work of enlightening one's mind; a meaningful spiritual life does not come easy. It is not free. It comes over time. It comes through impassioned discipline and the desire to know; and more importantly that precious knowledge must be put into practice, and the great mystery is that we find in enlightened practice a far more profound knowledge there waiting for us like an old friend from home. To practice the faith is to get first hand knowledge of who God is. To know God is to practice God...Enlightenment for the good of the whole. God, Godself, enlightened compassion inspired and enfleshed for the world God made; God, enlightened sacrifice for the creation entire; we, God's people, enlightened to bear mercy and compassion; we God's people enlightened to bear kindness and justice and peace to a world that darkens before our eyes. It is the practice of the faith in the dark corners of our world that engenders the knowledge of the faith; to practice God is to know God... new knowledge that will again empower our practice....a palindromic truth of the Faith.....Knowledge for the world's sake set loose begetting new knowledge....It is the way and practice of salvation itself; and it is now high time to begin... again.

Of Dry Bones and New Life

I was perusing my seminary's new web site and came across an archive of student sermons that were preached in Christ Chapel there. One sermon written by a classmate of mine was a reflection on the familiar passage in Ezekiel concerning the dry bones. You remember the passage: God speaks to the prophet, who finds himself in a desolate valley of dry bones, and asks him if these bones can live again. The prophet replies to God, "O Lord you know!" But God in great therapeutic fashion requires that this mere mortal answer for himself this mysterious question.

If we are paying attention we see that much of our world finds itself in the valley of dry bones: Homelessness; plagues of preventable diseases in the two-thirds world; hunger and thirst; the dis-empowerment of women; inadequate educational opportunities; inadequate access to health care; governmental corruption; unfair taxation; racism; unchecked violence; wars and rumors of war. We are up to our knees in dry bones, and God asks us, "O mortals, can these bones yet live?" And now it is for us to prophesy to these bones. It is for us as the people of God to breathe upon the dry bones; to breathe life into the deathly hurt of our world.

When confronted with the choice between Eden and the valley of dry bones, let us choose the bones, for it is in the desolate valleys of our world where we will find our true calling. In our raising to new life the dead of our world we will find our own true life, our own true selves. This is what resurrection is; not an otherworldly supernatural event, but a way of life for us in this world that God loves; we the very means, the very breath of God's love. In every act of sacrifice for our sister; in every act of sacrifice for our brother, the dry bones rattle and take on flesh and sinew, take on breath, and stand with dignity. Let us choose the valley of the dry bones, for there we will meet a certain hope; there we will meet the Christ; there we will meet our God; and there we will meet ourselves, fully human and fully divine.

Of Holy Things and Holy People

Sacraments are defined in the Catechism of the Episcopal Church as outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. Our particular sacraments we name are Baptism, Eucharist, Unction (anointing of the sick), Marriage, Confirmation, The Reconciliation of a Penitent and Ordination. There are seven of these signs of the holy in the church, but we of course remember that the number seven in scripture takes on symbolic significance. The disciples asked Jesus, "How many times must we forgive....as many as seven?" Jesus answered, "Not seven but seventy times seven." So the seven "official" sacraments are the mere tip of the iceberg. All things point to the essence of who God is...all things, animate and inanimate, (physicists tell us now that there is no difference)...all things living sacraments drawing us into the beauty of the divine...beauty not found in the aloof ethereal void....but beauty found in the common things of earth. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," Gerard Manley Hopkins writes. The liturgical life of the church is a procession of signs that tell us who God is and therefore who we are. The two are profoundly and intimately related.

I was told by my priest when I was growing up that the Eucharist was the principal sacrament: A family meal in which all partake as equals, in which all are nurtured for the way ahead, in which all are empowered for God's work in the world. And then after the publishing of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, Baptism rose to a central place in our liturgical life: Death to self by water (I'm reminded of the opening scene in Shakespeare's Tempest: a profound image of the transforming power of such a common thing as water); and then new life that water brings, indeed there is no life without water....Baptism, a transformation by water into a new life of sacrifice for the good of the whole.

These are indeed central to our lives as people of faith; because we have to see the truth to believe it: sacraments the outward and visible signs of truth; but I want to suggest perhaps one more among the infinite number of sacraments in our world that is at the heart of the spiritual matter: The Church....the Church, the community gathered in the faith, the people of God outward and visible signs of God's very life in earth....the people of God, living sacraments bearing God's transforming and saving life in earth....the people of God, called by the ancients ecclesia, the assembly gathered, strong together, the whole greater than the sum of its parts, bearing the mundane elements of the kingdom to a world needing to see and believe that there is yet hope...mundane elements of the kingdom like mercy and compassion; food and water and shelter for the dispossessed; and healing care for the diseased; things like justice and dignity in equal portion...these the rudiments of God's kingdom transforming our world, recreating the world into the way God imagines it to be. Let us be as the people of God outward and visible sign enough for the world, beginning here at the corner of Ann and Government streets, outward and visible sign of God's saving love now and among us. That would be something to see.

Of Faith and the Imagination

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great English romantic poet and incisive apologist on matters religious and spiritual, suggested in a defense of Christian orthodoxy against the puritans, the fundamentalists of his day, a radical premise. He wrote that in order to understand scripture one must employ the imagination; that it is the imagination that inspires scripture and not the reverse. It is the imagination that breathes life into the words of scripture and gives them renewed and perhaps new meaning. The ancient words of scripture are reconstituted, indeed transfigured and given new life through the imaginative process...God, in an intimate collaboration with the human imagination enabled, invited to speak in present tense.

Moreover, Coleridge would further say that the collective human imagination is synonymous with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that moved over creation in the beginning; the Spirit that indwells a people. The imagination now spelled with a capital "I." His most famous poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a veritable hymn to the transforming and saving power of the imagination. You will recall in the poem that the ship is becalmed and the crew is near certain death when the moon, a consummate symbol of the imagination, appears and an unlikely breeze picks up, fills the torpid sails and the ship is brought safely home. This idea of the power of the imagination is re-articulated in various ways by poets with neo-romantic sensibilities of the modern era: Hopkins and Yeats of England and Ireland, Stevens and Frost of the U.S., Borges of Argentina to name a few. The mystics of all faiths have forever known the truth of this. The alchemists' quest to turn mundane elements into gold, yet another symbol of the transformative power of the imagination.

What does this mean for us, as people of faith? As we are made in God's image, we are made to create. Through the sacred power of the imagination, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we like the One who created us are called to speak the world into being. "In the beginning was the Word," the Gospel of John begins. Words are artifice....from the realm of the beautiful...creations sprung from the imagination set loose in the world as means of saving change, means of the new creation, the means of a primordial sacred order breaking into our world now and not yet. We are forever "in the beginning" speaking the Word, shimmering artifice, words of the Word that take on the flesh of the new creation.

And words inform deeds...deeds also sacred artifice that will save and transform, and order the world to which we have been given. And imaginative deeds beget new words in a cosmic dance whirling to a humming rhythm that governs the very stars themselves. Every word, every action comes from the Spirit, the enlivened imagination, and exists solely for the good of the whole. The art is not for the artist to possess, but for the apprehension of the many. As pilgrims on the way, ours is to speak and act into being such fruits of the imagination as goodness and truth, kindness and mercy, compassion and forgiveness, and saving justice made manifest in infinite possibilities; components of the beautiful... Let us speak into being a sustainable dignity for our dispossessed sisters and brothers who share the common blood of our humanity. We are made for this, and this alone. Imagine God's kingdom for the world until we wake and find our alchemical dreams to be true....that things in earth are as they are in heaven.

Of Martyrs and Pilgrims

This past Saturday a few of us from All Saints joined others from the diocese of the Central Gulf Coast and the diocese of Alabama in pilgrimage to Hayneville, Al., a small hamlet some thirty miles southwest of Montgomery. August 14 is the feast day on the Episcopal calendar of saints of Jonathan Myrick Daniels who on this very day in 1965 was gunned down by a part-time Lowndes County sheriff’s deputy.

Daniels was an Episcopal seminarian from Boston. He and some colleagues postponed their seminary studies to help with voter registration in Alabama which was (and some now argue still is) bitterly divided along racial lines in the social turbulence of the sixties. While working in Hayneville, he and his companions were abruptly arrested and jailed. The conditions of the Lowndes County jail were squalid: no working plumbing and no air conditioning. After three days they were mysteriously released. They walked together in the August heat around the corner to a country store for a soda. They were met at the door by a man weilding a shotgun. The killer pointed the gun at an eighteen year old college student from Tuskegee named Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed her to the ground and stepped in front of the barrel. The killer pulled the trigger at point blank range and Daniels bled to death there on the front porch of the store. The killer despite eye witnesses was acquitted in the nearby Lowndes County courthouse.

The liturgy of the pilgrimage had us process behind the Cross to each site: the jail, the store, and the monument on the town square. At each station we sang songs, read the account of Jonathan Daniels martyrdom, and we prayed. The procession ended in the courthouse for a closing Eucharist, the judge’s bench from which the killer was acquitted years ago now made into an altar. There startlingly the bread and wine in our midst, old and young, rich and poor, black and white, male and female, gay and straight, all gathered for a family meal. There justice breaking out in a place where a great injustice was done.

Indeed the Eucharist is a cardinal symbol of justice. It is a meal to which all are invited, all are fed in equal portion and all are empowered for the way ahead….a meal does that: reconstitutes our bodies for renewed life; sacred nurture coursing in our blood; sacred power for the good of the whole. May our life blood be at one with the blood shed by our brother, and all who gave their life’s blood for a just and better way….all those who bore to their world the Salvation of Christ. Blessed Jonathan, pray for us. Pray for us as we sojourn in earth; pray that by our own blood God’s sacred and reconciling justice will be manifested in earth, once and for all.

Of Prayer and Hurricanes

I was talking to a priest friend of mine whose parish is on the Florida Gulf Coast. He recently went to the annual blessing of the fleet. Each year a different clergy person from the denominational diversity of the area is asked by the mayor to lead the prayers. My friend's turn comes up next year. This year a pastor of a local protestant church was asked to pray, and at one point in his litany amid the plea for a good catch, real estate sales and the increase in tourism income, he then addressed the possibility of hurricanes, everyone at the gathering of course keenly aware of the approaching season. He asked God: "to please send said potential approaching hurricane to their beloved city's east or west." (At least they gave God an option)That wouldn't necessarily bode well for us here in Mobile, or for those in the eastern parts of the diocese. So I guess our job at the approach of a hurricane is to out-pray our neighbors, a spiritual tug-of war for God's capricious favor. We even heard church folks and government officials after Ivan and Katrina talk about how God had blessed us that we avoided the brunt of those storms. One person's blessing another one's curse, I suppose.

All of this absurdity has caused me to reflect on the nature of prayer. Walter Brueggemann, noted theologian and Biblical scholar, defines prayer as the conscious act of aligning our collective will with God's will. That's helpful, because we are given many clues in scripture as to what God's will is. God wills mercy; God wills that God's people are fed sheltered and clothed; God wills the welcome of stranger in sacred hospitality;God wills the healing of God's people; God wills us to forgive; God wills nonviolence; God wills saving justice and dignity for all of God's people. So our prayers should be predisposed for the good of our neighbor. In prayer we remind ourselves of who we are as God's people; and we remind ourselves that we are the means of God's will in earth. And yes we pray for our own needs, but always, always in the context of our neighbor and the community of which we are a part. In prayer we are also commended to give thanks for and exult in the beauty of creation. Prayer is a decidedly communal act; and prayer, at its heart is an articulation of sacrifice, as God's will is sacrifice. As a church we are, in short, a community of sacrifice called to enact God's will as we discern it through the practice and prayers of the faith.

Indeed as the people of God we become prayer for our world, living, incarnate words of God's love bearing God's will to the brokeness of our world. This takes work, I believe. Prayer is not sentimentality, but an imaginative and enlightened exercise in apprehending God's will alive among us amid the beautiful and dangerous intricacies of every day living. This is prayer that works, literally; this is real power, the very power of God set loose in the world transforming, recreating the world for the better.....real power found in sacrifice....more powerful than hurricanes. God's will be done, and let us pray that God's will is done sooner than later.

Church and the world: the Promise and the thing

Kristen Campbell, the intrepid editor of the religion section of the Press Register called me yesterday to talk about an article she was working on. The article has to do with the economic realities these days: high prices, tight credit, joblessness, the spector of "stagflation" come back from the past.....economic realities and how the Church in its mission and ministry is responding to these challenges. She asked if we as a church see an increased need in the people we serve. Of course, if we are paying attention, and I believe we are, we do see a spike in the need of our poor and working poor neighbors. Our Foodshare project can't keep up with the number of people who arrive as early as three in the morning to receive groceries. Eviction notices abound. The expense of transportation alone is crippling. Among the economically weak there is a smoldering despair, and despair breeds indignity and indignity, shame.



Toward the end of the interview she said, "I want to ask you perhaps a goofy question.....What does the church have to do with socio-economic concerns? Not a goofy question but a vital one, I said. What is our role as people of faith amid the social, economic and political warp and woof of our world? As people of faith, the short answer is that we have everything to do with it. It is the central call of the gospels, decidedly political, social and economic; and our chief call as well. It is the people of faith imaginatively empowered in community who will challenge the injustices of the status quo. It is the people of faith who will take concrete action to address the indignities of our culture and of our world. It is the people of faith who will speak up for the weak among us. At the heart of God's kingdom that we bear to the world is the demand for justice and dignity for all....justice and dignity, synonyms for salvation...... and Salvation is not a heavenly abstraction, but tangible ways of living as the human family: adequate and accessible healthcare; food and shelter enough; a living wage; a nonviolent world (just war theory has run its course); forgiveness and second chances; and yes conversation with presumed enemies (love your enemies Jesus commands us) It is the people of faith who will proclaim and live out the reality that truly all of us, rich, poor, black, white, gay and straight; every race, nation, language, and people, every religious consciousness....are of one blood, so until all of our world are saved....justified and dignified....then there is no justice and there is no dignity for any of us.



We matter. We matter for the world's sake. Between God's promise and the thing itself, the world lies waiting...and the time is short.

Who is God to you?

I really didn’t want to read it, but I couldn’t help myself. I’m speaking of the big feature article in the Press Register Saturday on the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. I was hopeful that the reporter at some point in the article would offer an intelligent critique; at least an acknowledgement that not all Christians believe this way, but alas there were no such qualifications. There was a photograph that showed the spacious museum with a long line of people waiting to enter.

On the museum’s website is the banner saying “Prepare to Believe.” Their crusade, of course, is to convince people that the cosmos literally came about as narrated in Genesis (actually there are two creation stories in Genesis written by different authors); and that the theory of evolution is erroneous. According to the founder/director, as shown in the pictorial exhibits in the museum, every species of animal life is descended from the animals that were gathered into the ark; that the earth is only 5300 years old; carbon dating is a hoax….you get the picture. Literalism deflates the rich meanings of scripture, which are forever being interpreted and reinterpreted. Literalism belies the very deep truth we seek. It is an easy and irresponsible way out. I have never understood why some think the theory of evolution is in opposition to the Genesis accounts of creation in the first place. The two are entirely compatible. They just come from different sides of the brain….one, mythic art; the other, science.

I remember a Bill Moyers interview of Jonas Salk some fifteen years ago, a few years before he died. Amid a fascinating conversation on a range of ideas, Moyers asked Dr. Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine and arguably one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, “Who is God to you?” Salk mused for a moment and said, “Well, there are many, many metaphors that we could employ in order to speak of God, but there is one that perhaps suits me best, and that is evolution. “Evolution?” Moyers replied a little surprised. “Yes,” Salk continued. “God is the inexorable life force of our world that continues to reinvent itself from generation to generation, adapting to the vicissitudes of life on this planet in ways that stun the imagination; that God is still creating the world with an extravagant palette; that God becomes Godself through the infinite diversity of God’s own imagination.”

Moyers replied, “You sound like you are a person of faith.” “Oh if you only knew….”