Of Darkness and Deliverance

We approach the Winter Solstice, the darkest time of the year. In ancient ritual, in cultures around the planet, at the Winter Solstice, worshipers would encircle a fire and bid their God to descend from the darkness beyond into their midst...fire inviting fire, of like mind, to enlighten the dark. The dating of Christmas in our tradition follows this ancient one...all religious practices sprung from the ancient, bearing mystery from the dawn of time into present symbol. Christmas is set just after the solstice when the days begin broadening, when the long ebbed light makes its return in spite of all the cold and in spite of all the dark.

We are the heirs to the ancients as we stand around our fiery altars as the conscientious faithful, and invite our God into our midst, and into the world's midst. Our God manifest in the figure of a vulnerable child, a child whose life is light, which is the light of all people, John's Gospel informs us. We too, like the coming Christ are light bearers to the world...light as vulnerable as a child, guttering against the dark and cold...but like a child, full of promise...full of hope...full of love. So we celebrate our coming birth as well...this light-birth.

This light that is coming will reveal as plain as day the ways of heaven in earth: that nothing in the economy of God is lost; that all things matter; that mystery carried by beauty transforms; our meal taking and hospitality, rhythmic rudiments of the way life really is; that compassionate sacrifice graces our neighbor and heals our souls; that justice and peacemaking are the real hope that begins now in earnest; that the world is being forever made new and we in it; that death and life are the same beautiful song....and the darkness, mere contrast...It is something to celebrate, this light, this fire inviting fire, despite all that cold and all that dark.

Of Love's Strategy

I've been reading a compendium of essays by Johann Baptist Metz, a Roman Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, entitled Love's Strategy. First and foremost in Metz's mind is the reality that the coming of the Christ is the coming of Love, the Love of God made manifest in earth, in the warp and woof of the human condition, in all aspects of our common life, in the political realm (political meaning: how we order our common life), the social, the economic, in industry and agriculture...all affected, influenced and transformed by the strategy of Love. This is Love oriented towards the future, Love that is active and transformative, Love brought to bear in bold acts of hope, Love a way of living the way we are made to live.

As Christ's raised body in the world, we are Love's strategists. It is up to us as people of faith to set this Love loose in the world, so that the world may be changed for the better. Love is not static, but on the move. Metz calls it enlightened conscience. That means we must practice this strategy, our life's vocation, as a high art; we must study, worship, pray, and pay attention intelligently to our world, to the matters that would hinder this love so passionate for us, and not so patient. This is the life of the church: to be enablers of Love's strategy in earth...a strategy that can be apprehended in each bold act of loving sacrifice....sacrifice, living for the good of the whole, the template of such a strategy.

In Advent we are called on in Hebrew Scripture, by Isaiah and Baruch, and in the Gospels by John the Baptizer, to prepare the way of God, a way which begins as we speak; and to prepare the way of God is to prepare the way of Love...to recognize and break down the barriers that would hinder such love...to prepare for the change love brings...change for the better for all of God's beloved...no one left out...Love would not have it any other way....strategy enough for a world made new.

Of Thanksgiving and Ambiguity

Our children arrive tomorrow for the holiday. I'm happy about that....I haven't seen them in six months. Their coming has caused me here in late mid life, in the waning light of Fall, to take stock of things that make this earth heaven:...their gracious friendship...my wife who loves me more than I deserve...my mother who believes in me...the work I get to do, and this fine parish within which I get to do it...the beauty of this city by the bay...the rusting sedge of the delta...the Spanish moss...the glide of the pelican...I could go on... but also there is grief in this season...I miss my father...friends dead and gone...unresolved family quarrels...our own coming death...joy and pain held together in a sweet mystery indissoluble.

Ambiguity is the rhythm of life...the light and the dark, necessary for each other...artful contrast at the heart of our knowing, and our being...we are not whole without the whole of it: controversy and resolution; regret and joy; anguish and restoration; love and death.

Our culture would tell us otherwise, that life is supposed to be all bright, all happiness, but where is the art in that? Ours is to own the ambiguous beauty of life in earth, for such is the way of heaven: beauty made manifest among the light and the dark textures of existence. beauty, not just at the surface, but beauty that has the resonance to transform and create...the ambivalent shadow-side of life mere birth pangs of the new. So I give thanks for the whole of it...the whole of life's experience...the whole that God calls and celebrates as very good.

Of Building Jerusalem

The principal aim of Hebrew Scripture is to tell the story of a people loved and chosen by God, a people sent in mission to build Jerusalem, the holy city envisioned by God through the patriarchs, the judges and kings and sages and prophets. And once built, scripture tells us, this same Jerusalem is in urgent need of restoration...an eschatological irony to be sure: We arrive and yet we are not yet there...an emblem of the life of faith. The people of Israel are rescued from slavery in Egypt and sent out to build the city of God, a city in which the lowly and abased are raised up, a city that protects the orphan and widow, a city in which self interest is cast out for the sake of the whole. Throughout the Biblical narratives there is a dynamic tension between that which is, and that which might be; between the reality of despair and poverty, violence and disease, and the way of hope and healing, justice and abundance and peace...the people of God the tipping point.

New Testament literature continues the theme and names this enlightened and intentional way of life, the Way of Christ: the way that is predisposed to sacrifice, living our collective lives for the outcast, the least and the lost; this the the way of vulnerability. We are told by our spiritual forebears that such a way engenders abundant living, a life in the heart of God, a life of true joy; to build and tend a city, a gracious commonweal, within whose bounds the truth is spoken in love, and enacted with courage and grace; in which creativity governs instead of fear.The bounds of this city are no bounds at all, but portals of welcome and hospitality...portals to life and light.

To build this city in our own time is our life's work, and this work can and will be complicated, controversial and unsettling at times, but such is the way of the cross, that symbol of our life and labor, offered in unyielding sacrifice....and with humility and a good sense of humor. The new Jerusalem, the new heaven and the new earth waits to be born at the hands of the human community, worn hands that bear God's very life; the ropey veins and arteries a map of the world....Hands called into a labor of love.

The purpose of the church is to nurture, and encourage and celebrate such a vocation; a place of refreshment and empowerment for the way ahead; enabling our place in the way upon which many have already walked and given courageously their life and labor. We are heirs of their craftsmanship, of their enlightened industry...the new builders of this city to be...this city whose portals open as we speak to all who would come and build...and there we will find welcome and rest...and it is marvelous in our eyes, this peaceable and glittering city of God...We are not yet there and yet we arrive.

Of Song and Seasons

Every season has its song. The music of Fall is decidedly different from the music of Summer, Spring and Winter. Vivaldi thought as much. So did Keats and Byron and Eliot. The changing of seasons has inspired artists since time immemorial. The earth acts differently depending on the season: In the summer one won't see yellow leaves scuttling down city streets; or feel the brace of a cool morning; nor would one behold the ambiguous sunlight glittering on the water at a slant. Those phenomena belong to the Fall of the year, when the ways of earth mature and ripen and slow down to take account...of the harvest...of mutability...of waning light...the coming cold...of our dead....the music now in a minor key.

The liturgical life of the church is emblematic of the way we live according to season. We begin Advent soon. We leave off reading about the life, teaching and ministry of Jesus, and we recount again the prophecies of renewal and restoration, and we remember the promise and hope of a new birth that bears profound possibility as to the way ahead. We do this as the light lessens. The service music will be different, the hymnody, the vestments change, the procession changes...All pointing to the reality that the earth and our lives in earth participate in a mysterious and beautiful transience, divine process set to song, that animates the universe entire... the becoming that is and is to come.

Pay attention to the truth of the season...for seasons sing of truth...pay attention, for this season of "mists and mellow fruitfulness" won't last...seasons beget new seasons that sing their version of truth too; but for now the earth begins sacred rest, accounting for what is gleaned and what is lost...and begins preparation for sleep...sleep in hope of season come round again, as if for the first time.

Of All the Saints

This past Sunday, All Saints Day, we beheld the outward and visible evidence of the vitality of this venerable place and of its faithful people. The music and the liturgy and our joyful participation in it were emblematic of a church that matters. Over the past one hundred years parishioners have gathered here for nurture and empowerment and rest in order to live lives of integrity for the good of the community we serve. All Saints has the reputation of being a welcoming community; a community of gracious hospitality; a place to which the stranger is invited; a place in which there are no outcasts; an informed people who care for their neighbor and the least fortunate and least dignified among us....these the characteristics and demands of the Gospels. There is not a week that goes by in which I am not thanked for the work you do in Mobile and beyond. I am proud to be part of such a community.

The challenges and demands of the next one hundred years for All Saints will be many. I see the role of the church as compassionate advocacy; a predisposition of profound relevancy and action. As people of conscience, people of faith, people of the way of Christ, we are duty bound to call for justice and peacemaking; duty bound to be advocates for healing, duty bound to be enlightened critics... duty bound to enact compassion and dignity where there is despair and dishonor. Churches that sit impassively on the sidelines on the matters that face us as world citizens will cease to be. The Gospels require us to be advocates for, and bearers of, goodness wherever the potential for such transformation exists. The Gospels require us to live a life for the good of the whole, the sustainable and mutual commonweal that our God, as recounted by our wise forbears, envisions... God's coming kingdom but a collaborative communion of equals, and to bring it to birth is our life's work.

In this century we will as a people of faith have to address intelligently the shocking realities of a world grown small and intensely interrelated. As people of faith we have to address the truth about climate change and its disproportionate harm to the poor. Why? Because we are named in scripture as stewards of Creation and friend of the least....We will have to address the fast growing disparity of wealth. Why? Because the Gospels teach us that we are to live in God's abundance through self-giving and sacrifice for the other...We will be duty bound to heal the sick and feed the hungry, and give water to the thirsty and stop the violence of our world...The Gospels demand that our faith lives and moves in the public sphere as God's transforming love...love incarnate in the world in our very hands, hearts, minds and bodies. And we will for another hundred years continue to gather as often as we can to praise our God who calls us into such a high vocation...We will as a liturgical community gather and name as beautiful this life of faith that changes our world for the better. What gracious responsibility and honor God bestows upon us...something worth celebrating...Rise up you saints of God...there is much yet to do....and so little time...even if a hundred years.

Of One Hundred Years

This Sunday we will celebrate the centennial of All Saints Parish, four to five generations of a people of faith who have gathered Sunday to Sunday at the corner of Government and Ann streets. The people of All Saints have experienced two world wars, economic depression, the invention of weapons of mass destruction, humankind's venture into space, the invention of computer technology, immunization, movies and television, civil rights reform, the advent of feminism, birth control, the poetry of Eliot, Dickinson, Hughes and Stevens, the prose of Faulkner, Steinbeck, O'Connor, Morrison and McCarthy, the art of Wyeth, Warhol and O'Keeffe, the music of Barber, Gershwin, Ellington and Bernstein, the plays of Williams, O'Neil and Miller, presidents...hurricanes and lynchings and jubilees and kings and queens and balls and despair and joy and life and death and many seasons...change and the naming of change...the making and remaking of our world....the universe expanding.

And what of the next one hundred years? The effects of global warming, over population, new wars and rumors of wars, the decline and fall of nations, perhaps our own, new birth, and our own very deaths....the continued rubric of change and transformation...the continued making and remaking of the created order, which is no order at all but the blossoming forth of possibility and potential bearing the mystery of being on ahead...the potential of future borne in the present and past, hope its talisman....birth pangs and surprise and regret and joy...It shall be much the same and so utterly different.

What is our place in this grand procession of being? We are to point the way as best we see it; we are to name the truth of the matter as best we apprehend it; we are to enact the light of goodness that sets right exponentially this process of becoming. We are the people who have chosen and choose conscience; we are they who point to the way; the way of mercy and compassion and justice and peace: alchemical rudiments of transforming the leaden dispossession of our world into golden dignity, the commonweal of grace ordained in the beginning... And one more thing: We are to praise the God who inhabits this marvelous becoming...we are to sing the song of creation in both minor and major key; we are to prayerfully and passionately pay attention...at least for the next one hundred years...at the very least.

Of Days of Heaven

We are reading Job in the Hebrew Scripture portion of the lectionary right now. We had the option in year B of reading Genesis and Amos and Isaiah, but we chose the enigmatic Book of Job. The Book of Job offers a theological critique, a theological challenge to the dominant Deuteronomistic theology of Hebrew Scripture, the theology that pervades the Law and the Prophets. The theology goes like this: If the people Israel are loyal to Yahweh, worshipping only him, then they will receive blessing; if the people of Israel are disloyal and stray in their devotion to the worship of other gods (yes, there were many in ancient Palestine and in Jewish culture) then God would curse them...the quid pro quo of the Covenant.

Job is a good man, loyal, faithful, pious and dedicated to Yahweh. He is the archetype of Israel keeping Covenant...and yet all manner of pain and suffering and loss is visited upon him...and Job won't take it lying down. He becomes Everyman demanding an answer of his God to the time immemorial question as to why, as Rabbi Kushner puts it, why do bad things happen to good people. For some thirty five chapters Job demands not just answers but he demands that God show his face and stand face to face with this loyal but suffering soul, and fess up as to this profound paradox called creation.

And then God finally speaks...this, the longest soliloquy that God has in the whole of scripture. God begins to describe the wonders of creation found in the natural order...full of God-enthusiasm, God gets carried away, almost ecstatic, exulting in God's own artistry, an artistry that is random and playful, an artistry that even sets God awestruck...Can't you see it!? God lovingly asks Job.....Can't you see the divine in this heaven that you call earth? And the climax of this legend is that Job does see at last...Job sees God face to face within the mysterious beauty and genius of God's artifice we call Creation. To experience God's genius is to experience God....Dogma won't do it...beauty and mystery will.

We would do well to look well...for our God is all around and among us...We only have to look to the slanting light among the live oaks...the cobalt of the sky...the splash of the pelican...the music of the seasons...the cool of Fall...the miracle of eggs...the warmth of human touch....the gift of forgiveness...It is in beauty in her myriad manifestations where we will encounter our Creator who is enthusiastic to a fault still about the prospects of creation...It is in beauty...God's very genius, and ours as well, that we will know the days of heaven right here in earth...Just look and you will see.

Of a Matter of Life and Death

About six weeks ago a dear friend of mine who lives in Dothan was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I talked to him this morning. His disease is in an early stage, and his prognosis is less dire than most, but in all likelihood he won't live past five years. Today was his first day back at work, and he remembered a time some fifteen years ago when I went to his office to console him as his marriage had fallen apart. I remember it now...the light in the room...He remembered that day fifteen years past, and called me to talk about death and faith and hope and love.

He said he had just returned from M.D. Anderson and he said he thought that the way he was treated there, not just by the doctors, but the nurses, staff, the waiters in restaurants, the taxi drivers, store clerks, hotel employees, was the way the kingdom of God might be; and that he has returned home with hope and peace and an unbridled joy at the way he has been loved. I told him that he was seeing the kingdom already in its becoming; that in his paying attention, living prayerfully, (prayer, the art of paying attention) he is seeing the world as it really is...he is seeing the world as God knows the world to be, a world in which death is no enemy...but sacred as life is sacred....one process of a perfecting universe.

Jack Spong asserts in his new book that organized religion chiefly came about in order for us self-conscious humans to cope with the reality of death, even to escape it, and I think that is true to a certain extent. But in facing death honestly and imaginatively, whether imminent or distant, I believe we are able to see life the way it is meant to be; the way life really is.... that peace and hope and joy come inevitably, in spite of any circumstances; we see the value of community which is the means of God's gracious commonweal bearing love that is, in truth, stronger than death....love that is, in truth, stronger than fear....the love light present in the room.

I will continue to pray for my dear friend, and I will give thanks for his faithful witness to the truth of the matter; that his days in God's peaceable kingdom are marked by love and life and hope that vanquishes fear and despair, and that at the last he will find rest for his soul. That is a prayer for all of us is it not?...all of us mere sojourners in the profound sweet shortness of the days of heaven in earth.

Of Rest and Labor

One of my favorite pieces of music is John Rutter's Requiem. On September 11, 2001, my first day of seminary, in our liturgical music class, instead of a lecture, we went to the chapel and simply listened to Rutter's Requiem in homage to the dead killed by terrorists on that day. The last piece of the Mass is the Lux Eterna, that begins in pristine unison and broadens into four part harmony making the claim that the dead "rest from their labors." Rest from what? I thought. Rest from life's difficulties; rest from pain, from anxiety; rest from burden?

No, I mused, we rest from the labor of bearing God's life to the world. That is our vocation. That is the sole work for which we exist, for which we were made; and it is work that we share, work that is collaborative, mutual; work and the fruits of which, that are greater than the sum of its parts. This is the work of creation, shouldering the artful process of making and remaking the world according to God's vision of it. This labor is hard and requires our attention and intention and courage and perseverance:....the making of justice up and against the intractable injustices in our world....forgiving and forbearing each others' faults....practicing the art of healing our wounds and illnesses....feeding the hungry...caring for our planet...hard work....and we don't abdicate that work to an aloof deity who operates on his own; there's no such God...Our God graciously inhabits and empowers this work in us...we the means of God in earth; we God's very flesh and blood; God's hands and feet and heart.There is no other way. There's no other choice.

The reward is rest...something in our culture that is in short supply...rest and its accompanying peace and satisfaction and meaning and enlightened perspective...no small thing as reward for our bearing God's life to the world...and this rest doesn't only come in the end...It comes as gift along the way. Labor and rest, our life cycle, and when we give ourselves to this our true nature, our true calling, then life is rife with meaning and purpose and beauty... and fear is banished....that's a promise to us from our wise forbears. Go then with joy into the workplace of creation for there you will find sacred rest for your souls and you will be fully alive beyond all imagining; and the world God loves, the better for it.

Of Creation and Purpose

Last week in this space I reflected on Bishop Spong's new book on Eternal Life and a new religious consciousness beyond traditional theism. I appreciate Spong's bold iconoclastic approach to matters of faith, and, as I said, Spong has given us fresh and mature language with which we are more able in a post-modern context to speak of the life of faith unfettered by literalism and superstition; he has given us language by which we are able to speak intelligently about Christianity with an integrity that does not cease to be passionate and spiritual. That is not to say that I agree with everything Spong says. He still struggles with his own ego-centrism and with his lifelong battle to escape his literalist roots; all the while acknowledging both.

Spong makes the bold claim early on in Eternal Life... that the purpose of the universe is not life. He hasn't yet referred to some other, or some grander or transcendent purpose, but the implication is that perhaps in the randomness of the origins of the universe, there is no purpose whatsoever...that the universe just is....no telos (no ultimate direction)...no meaning....just random iterations and reiterations of gas and metal and carbon chains and water....of unimaginable heat and unfathomable cold...and loneliness and fear.

The fact of the matter is...there is purpose everywhere....where there is illness, the purpose is healing...where there is despair, the purpose is hope...where there is hunger, the purpose is to nurture...where there is injustice and indignity, the purpose is to set things right, to restore what we know is meant to be...What is right? What is meant to be?...Oh, don't bother to ask, for we know don't we...this knowledge, this genius contained in the DNA of the stars...this mysterious helix of truth and goodness and sacrifice, spiraling towards a mysterious perfection amid a randomness... a randomness that we dare trust and praise as divine.

Could it be that as the universe becomes still.... that purpose becomes still...the chief symbols of this becoming: change and adaptation and transformation and evolution...the cosmic musical refrain....Perhaps at each intersection point of this transformative process, this assaying of the universe.... new purpose is engendered, fiery birth of implicit necessity...the new vocation of the midwife bringing into life that which inevitably becomes...for example, it would have been unthinkable three hundred years ago to say that global warming threatens our existence...but now it is a pressing reality...Certainly we must be purposeful towards restoring the sustainability of our planet...a new purpose heretofore unknown...but known now...Who knows what purpose will become amid the Creation's becoming, who knows for what purpose to which we will be called, that which will evolve three hundred years from now, and again and again. The cosmos rife with purpose...purpose engendered by change and empowered by love, yes love a rudiment as well.

The imperative for us people of faith is that as community we must pay attention, we must think critically and imaginatively; we must seek and work toward being enlightened so that we may artfully and skillfully apprehend the purpose to which we are called....purpose that comes as we speak, ever changing, ever becoming, and we dare not miss its coming...this the Creation in its very becoming, imagining in transcendent proportions the purpose at hand....The clue for me in this process, is that wherever there is sacrifice for the greater good; wherever there is the work towards restoration...there we will apprehend a purpose, truth itself, that we can't deny to be true...and therefore we name it as divine....and celebrate.

Of Eternal Life

The Beth Murray Sunday School Class at All Saints is beginning study of Bishop Jack Spong's latest and perhaps last book entitled Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell. I'm really excited about the book, so I'm sitting in on the class. In some religious circles Spong is considered a heretic. I beg to differ. Spong's legacy is that he has given thinking Christians (no, that's not an oxymoron) fresh and intelligent insight into ways of thinking and speaking about the true nature and practice of the Christian life. His is a sane voice amid the cacophony of literalism and superstition in what passes for Christianity in a culture that eschews the art of critical thinking. Spong's work not only makes Christianity believable, but he also makes it livable. He has given us new and helpful ways of thinking ( scripturally based) about the so-called miracles, virgin birth, Jesus as human and divine, resurrection, ascension, and in this his new book he explores the illusive concept of eternal life and the speculation of life after death.

I have read just the first few chapters of Spong's new book, but that's got me thinking ahead. So here are some of my reflections on eternal life, before we read Spong's take on it: The Eternal is found in truth and beauty...that's my starting point. And Eternal life is not just about the future; it finds its way into the present as well as the past. Through the imaginative memory, individual and collective, eternal life can be found and named in past events, some of which we barely noticed when they actually occurred, but in memory we see the truth of the matter to which this often mundane event points....And we see it in the present, the truth of the matter...in the dynamic of life and death in the delta...the flashing trout...the wheeling gulls...the fading sedge...the taste of salt in the wind...the northeastern squall...all outward and visible sign of the profound divine that pervades the universe....In art: Picasso's Guernica, Shakespeare's Tempest....Dickinson's images of death,....it goes on forever, these ways into the eternal.... and eternal life pervasive among the human community...in every act of mercy....in every gesture of kindness...in each locale of bestowing justice and dignity...where there is hope...where love is imaginatively engendered, Eternal life is surely self-evident....a quality, an aesthetic of the divine that is seen, heard, felt and tasted by the imagination, the essential midwife of the eternal.

And of the future? Science tells us that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We humans now sojourn for a season in earth as self conscious beings; perhaps there is a consciousness far beyond that which we know: a transcendent consciousness of matter and energy, things animate and inanimate, dancing within the song of the universe...We know in string theory that the ultimate rudiment of the universe is tonality, sound waves, music. The song will forever be, and we forever in it and of it...forever a part of the creation's becoming, forever alive in the creation turning towards its perfection always apprehended in the sacramental common things of creation....starfish and star dust.... forever singing in high celebration of a high consciousness beyond all reckoning that perhaps waits in hopeful joy for us all...Imagine that.

Of Good and Evil

Theologians have pondered forever the problem of evil in our world. The great problem is of course, "Why would a God whom we say is loving allow bad things to happen in the world God loves?" It's a good question to which there are no easy answers. The escape route is to say that it is the presence of free will thus shifting the blame to humankind's proclivity towards wrong choices. That's a weak answer and egocentric to say the least, because there's plenty of mayhem and violence in the natural order itself. No, there is more mystery to this reality.

Some of us just watched at All Saints the movie, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a visually stunning but emotionally disturbing depiction of a cruel and hard world along the Mexican American border filled with betrayal and lies and pain and violence. The characters include a Texas cattle rancher, the vaquero (cowboy) Melquiades, a young overly zealous border guard and his wife, Mexican families along the border trying to migrate into the U.S., the promiscuous waitress at the diner who insists that she loves her husband, the crooked sheriff, the border patrol; the abuse of power, a character unto itself. One of the group commented during the discussion time after the movie that none of the characters were redeemable; that they all were at some level or another depraved.

And yet redemption comes in a very powerful way at the end of the movie; it came with tears, and it comes in the midst of all this depravity. How could this be so, we asked? After all, this is just a movie. What about the real world? Is there truly any hope for us? The evil that surrounds us is so very real and undeniable. Are things really any better than they ever have been? Perhaps things are getting worse. Where do we look for answers? Where do we look for hope?I would suggest that we would do well to pay attention to our artists...art forever the window onto the truth of the matter....we would do well to trust the imaginative word.

In spite of all the characters being participants in the world's evil in the movie, goodness and redemption comes inevitably. It comes through friendship. It comes through sacrifice for each other. It comes through simple acts of hospitality. It comes through compassion and mercy. It comes through welcome and bestowing dignity, and it comes through justice in the midst of injustice. Perhaps the evil in our world is that essential component of creation against which the good struggles and finds its life and thrives...evil a foil, a contrast against which we may apprehend the profound and transforming good that takes gentle root around us. Perhaps Goethe is right in Faust in which the protagonist even after selling his soul to the devil is redeemed; that the redemptive good will ultimately have its way in the end...the unscrupulous good using even evil for its purposes.

Indeed such alchemy is held up in the gospels, more imaginative word...Mercy and justice and compassion and goodness and welcome and hospitality and inclusion transforming a world that feels hard and unjust. All these the means of opening God's commonweal to all of earth, so that forever God and we the people of God, and the created order entire, can look upon all the world in the birth pangs of its becoming and dare to call it very good.

Of Health and Wholeness

It's hard not to be thinking about health care in our country right now. It is dominating the airwaves and cyberspace. It has prompted me to get out my own policy and try to figure out what my coverage is; I'm still figuring. The debate has certainly heated up conversations around dinner tables and civic meetings; and it is all so very complicated: to what extent should the government play a part, if any; will costs really be controlled and who controls them; how much in fact will it cost over the long haul. I'm having trouble sorting out the pros and cons, the wisest path; but I feel strongly about a few things: everyone needs access to health care; there should be no uninsured in this the wealthiest country in the world; health care should be affordable for all; and everyone should have equal benefits. The other thing that seems clear to me is that this will not be solved in a partisan manner. Such major reform will require colleagues of both parties and interest groups working respectfully and imaginatively toward the good of the whole. I have to believe that's possible. Now is not the time for intransigent posturing of interests.

Jesus had a lot to say about health and healing. Healing stories dominate the four Gospels, and they are told in the context of salvation. In our modern western world we have come to believe that salvation is a personal thing, the disposition of our souls earning us a heavenly reward, but salvation in the early church had to do with community living in the now, and even more to do with those alienated from community, principally: the sick, the naked, the homeless stranger, the illegal alien, the shamed. The healing stories in the gospels largely take place among the marginalized of our world...those on the outside... the unincluded...salvation in the ancient world had everything to do with the dignity of the community and the dignity of those the community welcomes; salvation comes when all are made whole... wholeness with dignity, the face of salvation....and salvation is impaired until all experience it.

To experience healing one is restored not simply to good health, but restored to the community that loves and nurtures, restored to dignity. Think how alienating an illness can be. In fact, there used to be Rites in Judaism and in the Christian church which welcomed the one healed back into the community. My father died early on Sunday morning in the hospital in 1984; then there was no Hospice where we lived. We got to the hospital just after he died. A nurse told me that he died with dignity. I've thought about what that might mean over the years, and in the context of the present day it may mean that he died amid loving and skilled care...his pain minimized as best possible...and not alone....Salvation has everything to do with our dying in dignity and our living with dignity...that makes the issue of health and wholeness a gospel issue...Let's hope that whatever is decided on our behalf is something ALL of us can live with...and die with.

Of Life and Labor

As we approach this coming Labor Day we will remember in our prayers this Sunday all who labor. We will specifically pray for justice in the workplace, justice being an imperative both in Hebrew Scripture and in the Gospels. Worker justice in our country continues to be a serious issue. The issue was the reason for the forming of labor unions in the first place; but now labor unions lack the influence they once had. Some would argue that that is a good thing, others would disagree, but the presenting problem of justice in the workplace persists still, however we intend to deal with it.

Worker justice has not only to do with a fair wage, but it also has to do with a safe environment, affordable benefits, adequate leisure, reasonable hours and due respect. Labor is a gift when it is performed in a just environment. It is the means of artful sacrifice; an outward and visible sign of human creativity that makes and remakes our world for the better. Labor performed in the context of injustice is quite the opposite. It debases and injures and stifles the creativity of the human spirit. Unjust employment practices abound in our city, our state, our country and our world broadly unseen, and it is our solemn promise as the Baptized that we will "strive for justice, and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being." That is job one for us Christian people.

This Labor Day weekend when we take our leisure, thank sincerely someone who labors; thank them for what they do, and for doing it well, for it is our labor that transforms our world, labor a rudiment of the process of Creation, labor that clothes and houses and feeds and waters and heals our world. We are lifeless without our sacred labor, so we give thanks for our own privilege of labor ourselves.

Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the created order, an outward and visible reflection of the Creator Godself... is process, an ever becoming and evolving reality...the created order and God in it still becoming what might be...the universe blossoming into goodness...Our labor then a high metaphor for this becoming...work and rest, work and rest...and at the last, on the seventh day, the joy of jobs well done.

Of Grief and Memory

Katharine's father will have been dead a year this coming September. We just spent a couple of days in Panama City going through some of his things. We passed on the back beach road Coram's restaurant, a place where he would go each morning around five thirty a.m. for coffee. He would smoke cigarettes and spin yarns with the charter boat captains. "What ya'll catching, Joe Ed?" He knew all their names, the names of their boats, about their families, and they loved him. Everyone Rhett knew or met he treated with dignity. It was the way he was.

We passed the Panama City Yacht club (yacht is stretching it a bit) where he used to race sailboats in his younger days; just off shore of the bay, the intra-coastal waterway snaking through the salt marshes of the Gulf coast towards Apalachicola, a route he took often just to get away among the cypress, osprey and oystermen. He was always happy on the water, and with things maritime.

The house is empty now; a few books about old boats, old records and pictures in boxes of lives lived, faded by the persistent salt air. I held an old wristwatch to my ear. It wasn't ticking. Still a faint hint of cigarette smoke in the house. Outside the bird feeders were empty and askew. I marvelled that the birds and waterfowl missed him too. Out on the dock there was still a rope coiled by his hands waiting to be cast or tied by his genius. A seagull wheeled and cawed as an indifferent wind hummed in the water sedge.

Everywhere was his presence, so called forth by memory, a grace beyond reckoning; memories no less true than if he had been standing there with us. He was there because love was there. Eternal life in the present moment engendered by a love that remembers, a love that will never die. We committed his ashes to the deep of St. Andrew Bay. May they exult there come home at last, and may his gracious presence exult with us here and now, wrought by loving memory. Let us forever remember each other, for remembering is a cardinal act of love.

Of Church and Church Going

When we say church what have we said? In the New Testament literature the word for church is eklesia, which literally means "gathered assembly." It comes from the ancient Greek that was used to describe the public assembly that governed the Polis, Plato's vision of a city governing themselves in an order that resembled the order of heaven. In Platonic thought all things in earth bear the form of the ideal in heaven. The Greek way of thinking dominates the first century Near East. Common Greek was the so-called international language of the Mediterranean in literature and in commerce. The Greek academy modeled from Egypt to Persia to Rome was the way people were educated. The early church communities and Synagogues were modeled after the public assemblies envisioned by Greek culture. These were communities that served each other in mutuality, the common good being the guiding light, the common good symbolized by the concept of justice, distributive and restorative justice. Plotinus referred to Plato's Republic first and foremost as an imaginative reflection on justice. Honor and dignity for each member was held up against the shame of slavery and Imperial occupation, so insidious in this world.These were learning communities, communities of intellectual inquiry which sought enlightenment and maturity. The Greek philosophical academy and the eklesia had much in common. They were places, gatherings, that inspired and empowered its people to shape for the better the people of the community gathered, as well as the world around them that they served. These were communities of enlightened change and reform and relevancy.

The post-modern church, some writers argue, is beginning to wake up to this ancient reality. The Church over the centuries in not so small a degree has abdicated its relevancy. It has largely become a private and exclusive organization that has woefully served itself. Our hyper individualistic culture affirms such a church and bids the church to mind its own business, to keep silent about the important matters that face us from generation to generation. To a great degree the church has complied.

Brian McClaren argues that the church might well be waking up to its true calling. The ones that don't he says will surely die. Church, at its heart, is a community of passionate people who bring their questions and opinions and hopes and dreams; their intellect and imagination, their arguments and quandaries, and their love of neighbor into a community that is committed to maturing into the people God intends them to be; an enlightened community that first and foremost serves our neighbor, the stranger, the lost and the least, a community of healers, a community of nonviolence, stewards of this paradise named Earth....a community that shapes with artful intention the world for the better. We celebrate this high call, this high responsibility, as often as we can in beautiful worship, in prayer and praise. Such a life is praiseworthy beyond all reckoning. We nourish each other and encourage each other for the way ahead. We continuously remind ourselves as a gathered people, who in truth we are: We are God's people. And we don't mind our own business. We mind the business of creation; we mind the business of creating with our God the world; reclaiming Eden inch by inch as God would have it. Therefore it is the business of the church to be enlightened citizens going forth into the world, speaking and enacting the truth as best we can, in public, strengthened by our artful gathering...critical mass, we, for the greater good... If we don't...who will?

Of Real Presence

Several All Saintsers have asked me questions about this past Sunday's sermon in which I mentioned the terms transubstantiation and consubstantiation. The former, an early medieval construct in Roman Catholicism, according to The Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms, means that the bread and wine in the Eucharist are "essentially changed" into the body and blood of Christ. The latter is a late medieval understanding of the Eucharist in which the bread and wine remain the same, but that they are conjoined or coexist with the body and blood of Jesus. Both miss the point, and certainly are a far cry from the theological understanding of the Eucharist in the early church.

The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is found in the community gathered, the assembly of the people of faith; the presence of God in Christ manifest in the commonweal of passionate and imaginative hearts grown wise in the practice of goodness. The celebrant in the Eucharist is in truth the people gathered there. Indeed in the early church every one would have been vested in chasubles (now only worn by priests) as the celebration depended on them. The priest was quite practically the one set aside by the community to preside over this celebration. Someone has to do it, else everyone would be speaking at once. Meals cause us to gather as family. Meals represent our life and labor, and the sacred art of sacrificial hospitality, that nurtures us for the way ahead. Meals are the center of life because they quite literally keep us alive. Meals are something worth celebrating. (If you haven't seen the new movie Julie and Julia, you must)

When the bread and wine are placed on the altar, that is the life and labor of God's people offered for God's blessing of empowerment. They are there also as a symbol of transformation. Bread and wine are the alchemical result of wheat and fruit changed into gracious gifts of nurture. So at the Eucharist we gather with God fully present among us and we offer our life and labor as a means of transformation for ourselves and our world. Our God is a God of change living within the life and labor of God's people become nurture for the hungry and thirsty of our world. Our life blood and the work of our flesh, not unlike the Christ, are taken, blessed and given to God's beloved upon the altar of the world...a gracious table to which all are invited, especially the ones who need this nurture the most. That is why at its heart, the Eucharist is a profound symbol of justice; and where there is justice, so there undeniably is the real presence of God.

California Dreamin'

The General Convention of the Episcopal Church affects me in a similar way that our liturgy does. Both are at once a celebration of who we are, of our life and labor together, of shared ministry and mission; but they are also imaginative speculations as to what we might become, or perhaps more rightly said, what we are in truth becoming.

Our liturgy is an enacted dream, an intentional speculation of what our world is intended to be, prophetic utterance speaking the future into being. At General Convention we imagined how the world would be healed via the millennium development goals, by tearing down the wall between Israel and the West Bank, by advocating steps to environmental sustainability, by addressing global warming, demanding just wages and worker justice, by decrying racism. We left California dreaming of a world intended by our God as best we could discern it: a just world of mutuality and compassionate interdependence.

Our liturgy is the way from week to week we Episcopal Christians imagine, dream of God's promised future. We recount who we are in the word of God. We remember that God acts among us, calling us forever into relationship. We remind ourselves that it is God's intention to heal and clothe and feed and dignify. We gather at God's table as equals who are all made in God's image, reminding ourselves that life begins at table together. We are reminded that it is our common life that feeds us and empowers us for this future dream that trembles into being as we speak; and then we are sent into the world as waking dream acting as if it were true. Dreams are not fantasy, but artifacts from the future, grounded in profound reality. If we but look we will see evidence of their already becoming, taking root in our world and in our lives. The dawn is coming, perhaps sooner than we know, when we will awake and find our dream, which is God's dream, to be true.

Of What's Going to Happen

It is clear that once again the issue around which the General Convention's energy is centered is the issue of human sexuality. Some would say, "why don't we get about the mission of the church, and get past matters pertaining to sex. There is a part of me that agrees, but we will not as a church ever get about robust ministry of bearing kindness and justice to our world until we deal with matters of kindness and justice in our own house.

In this convention we have a golden opportunity to move past the so-called Anglican Communion imposed moratorium on Episcopal elections of persons "whose manner of life" causes grief among some in the communion. There is an overwhelming mood in the House of Deputies, and among visitors who have testified in hearings, that favor full inclusion of all the baptized in the full sacramental life of the church, including the eligibility of our lesbian and gay sisters and brothers to be elected to the Episcopate. The resolution calling for the full inclusion of all the Baptized relative to ordinations, including gay and lesbian persons, (D025) passed overwhelmingly, 68%, in the House of Deputies. I proudly cast my vote for this resolution. We are not a church of moratorium; we are a church of inclusion, hospitality and blessing.

In spite of such inclusive sentiment, the bishops as a whole seem to be balking. They fear moving too fast, the acute matters of justice in our midst notwithstanding. They, many of them but certainly not all, say that we need more time for the Anglican Communion to catch up with the reality that homosexual persons are not perverse, but human beings like you and me, who have great gifts to offer the church. The reality in truth is that we already have moved on in the church. Homosexual persons are already serving with distinction as deacons, priests and bishops, and that will continue. Part of the overwhelming support stems from the wish that we name what already is the truth. The support was diverse: men and women, youth and older adults, people of color, from dioceses north and south. It is high time. The bishops will most likely take up this matter on Tuesday.

What will happen? The resolution could be rejected approved or amended, but no matter, the church will continue on its road to justice and welcome and inclusion, and we will continue to get healthier because of it, and we will become more relevant and empowered to speak the truth of the Gospel, because we will be practicing what we have been preaching. All people, all people are made in God's image, and we now have a golden moment in time to hold up this truth outwardly and visibly. That is what will happen, now or later.

Of Polity and Poetry

I feel like I've been in Anaheim a week, but I've only been here just three days. It's been that busy: Legislative committee meetings, deputy orientation, countless briefings. It's all been a little disorienting. Just stepping off the plane into forty five per cent humidity makes me feel like I've landed on another planet (I'm not complaining)....sixty foot tall palm trees everywhere. Katharine and I aren't seeing much of each other because of the tight convention schedule.



There are incredibly diverse interests represented at General Convention both among deputations and the various interest groups that come and make their case to the church. Media are everywhere: Integrity USA, a national organization of Episcopalians (of which All Saints is a member), who argue for the equal inclusion in the church, have a large and highly organized presence; We will in a few days vote on a resolution regarding the full inclusion in the sacramental life of the church of all the baptized (without discrimination or moratorium regarding sexual orientation); lobbyists for Native American justice issues are here; activists for racial reconciliation; advocates for the rights of refugees; worker unions; brochures and advocacy papers covering just about every cause abound. It's all very much overwhelming. Getting physically acclimated is quite enough without the myriad human issues that press all around us. Such is the polity of a church that is very much alive in its witness, a church called to bear justice to our world, a church living into the imperitive of the Gospel.



But this morning I was yet again reminded of what truly makes us Episcopalian Christians... and that's the way we worship. The opening Eucharist yet again showed me the beauty and the power and the peace that our liturgy embodies. At the end of the service my anxieties were quieted; I felt grounded and renewed for the work ahead. The music included classic Episcopal hymns as well as Hispanic and African music. We are no longer a national church culturally, but a global one, and the diverse artistic expressions in the service showed that we are authentic about our diversity.



Our call as a community of faith in mission and ministry for those beyond our doors is what our polity serves...Our polity, the infrastructure, as it were, of mission and ministry...our mission and ministry our story told in prose. Our worship is our story told in poetry...a beautiful speculation as to what we are becoming...what God wishes God's beloved and God's world to be. It is between the now and the not yet that we live the life of the church...the sacred ground upon which we stand..amid the poetry and prose of life telling a life story, God's story and our story still becoming in poetry and prose that beginning now, just as it always has begun, will redeem all in all.

Of Prayer and Polity

In a few days Katharine and I leave for Anaheim California where we will attend the seventy sixth General Convention of the Episcopal Church. I am one of four clerical deputies representing the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast in the House of Deputies. Even though the Episcopal Church is relatively small compared to other denominations, the General Convention is the largest legislative body in the world. There are some 850 members of the House of Deputies comprised of clergy and lay, four of each from each diocese; and there are some 200 plus members of the House of Bishops, active and retired. So when the Church speaks, it speaks from a broad and diverse base.

Any resolution or canonical action, or constitutional consideration must be concurred to by both houses for such action to be adopted. The bicameral polity of the General Convention (GC) was intentionally patterned after the newly formed United States Congress in 1789. Hence we are one of just a few democratic provinces in the entire Anglican Communion. Most other provinces are governed strictly by hierarchy; and statements made by those provinces are made unilaterally by the archbishop of the province. In our case we speak as the majority of the church through respectful debate and due consideration of matters of importance to the whole of the church. It is a fascinating process in which to participate.

The GC, though, is more than passing legislation. It is punctuated throughout by prayer and worship; and ardent conversation. There are celebrations affirming the many ministries that abound in the Episcopal Church. It feels more like a big family reunion. Sometimes there is a family fight, but mostly it is a grand gathering of people of good will and conscience and intellect intentionally seeking with all diligence what this church of ours can be; how we can make a meaningful difference in the Gospel matters of our world. I am honored to represent our diocese, and honored to be a priest of this church. I ask your prayers for me and for the seventy sixth General Convention.

Almighty God, source of all wisdom and

understanding, be present with those who take counsel

in the seventy sixth General Convention of the Episcopal Church

for the renewal and mission of your Church.

Teach us in all things to seek first your honor and glory.

Guide us to perceive what is right, and grant us both the courage

to pursue it and the grace to accomplish it; through

Jesus Christ our Savior. (BCP p. 818)

Of the Sacred Feminine

In the beginning was the mother God. So writes Jane Harrison anthropologist, linguist and scholar on ancient religions, pacifist and suffragette born in England in the 1870's. She found in her work in the early twentieth century that the origins of Greek religion came from fertility cults which worshiped the Goddess, the sacred Mother. Religious iconography throughout the seventh century B.C.E. was decidedly female. It is not until the sixth century that figures of the male gods appear. There is an ancient Persian myth called the myth of Mardok in which Mardok the rebellious warrior murders his mother who is the queen, and thus patriarchy and the ways of patriarchy are born.

According to Proverbs, the figure of Wisdom, she the queen of heaven, is the one who delivers Israel from the Red Sea; it is she who leads Israel through the Sinai desert; it is she who teaches the way of Torah; it is she who prepares the Eucharistic feast; she who stands in the marketplace and at the cross roads, in the midst of human commerce, demanding justice and mercy and hope. But alas, she is finally exiled from earth, banished to her ivory tower aloof in the heavens. But she still is, and she makes her appearance among us now and again.

We have been watching in horror in the news, thanks to Internet technology, the crackdown upon protesters in Iran. The primary face of the victim of this brutal abuse of power is the educated woman. Patriarchy and its modus operandi of violence fears most of all the sacred feminine. Patriarchy fears justice and peace and forbearance and freedom, because it would cede its grip on power and control in favor of the common good. Matriarchy is mutual and collaborative. Patriarchy is self interested.

We are seeing in our own time another attempt at exiling our Mother God, controlling, binding her for the sake of power and greed. We see her dying in the streets of Tehran; we see her occupied and held hostage in Gaza; in every act of violence she is battered: Just War an insidious illusion wrought by patriarchy. Who will speak for her? Who will call out the death spiraling ways of warfare and greed and corruption and violence? Who will free her from her exile, so that her ways become the ways of earth. "Come to me and I will give you rest; take my yoke upon you and learn from me", she pleads in the voice of Jesus in Matthew's Gospel; "for I am gentle and self giving of heart (my translation of the Greek); and you will find rest for your souls." Who will set her free? Who will break the rattling spear of patriarchy? It is now time....Who?

Of Small Things

When I arrived at the office this morning there was an older African American woman in the lobby in conversation with Mary R. and the volunteer. I assumed like so many of poor Blacks in our neighborhood, folks we see on a daily basis, she was another who was here seeking financial assistance. The volunteer informed me that she was here in fact to give us money. I was taken aback. Over a year ago, she told us, her daughter had come to All Saints needing financial help with a prescription. We were able on that day to help her, and bought the medicine she needed. This woman, the mother, had been instructed by her daughter, now that she had a job, to give to All Saints ten per cent of her latest paycheck in gratitude for what we did for her. It seemed such a small thing this bit of grace we were able to share; but for this woman and her daughter it was huge, so much so that their lives had been touched in a profound way.

Such is the way of ministry, the way of scattering seeds...small things that bear a sonorous resonance within the very fabric of the universe...lives changed; dignity brought to bear; a new creation at hand; things are changed profoundly with every small act of God, the potential of which we bear in our very hands and hearts... I think we all need to hear it; I know I certainly do: that God comes mostly in small and unexpected ways; that the seemingly small things we do for our neighbor, for the stranger, for the sick, the compromised; in every act of dignifying the shamed, small things mostly.....in these small things the heavens are brought near and God's gracious commonweal is made alive. Such is the way of things in God's economy...a collaborative, mutual caring for each other in ways no matter how small that divine grace is made real; for in God's alchemical economy these small things become profound and transformative...the mundane becomes shining gold. Every act of love no matter how small a quantity, bears the quality of God's reign here and now. Love defies quantity...Love is love, no matter how small...and I saw this morning what gratitude and praise love brings.

We are to scatter the seeds of love, no matter how small...It is quite enough for us to sow...for our God, through our hands and hearts, will redeem all in all...one small thing unto another.

Of Liturgy and Transformation

Liturgy, derived from the Latin Leitourgas, means literally "the people working." But working for what? I was once at a wedding rehearsal and the mother of the bride didn't like the way we were doing a certain thing in the marriage rite and was vocal about it. My response was that my job and every one's job when we gather here is to make the liturgy beautiful. That is the sole end of all worship: to enact and embody beauty. We don't gather here chiefly to propound doctrine and dogma, though it is important to say in a ritualized way, outwardly and visibly, what we believe (and that is in itself speculative); but we gather chiefly to celebrate the beauty of being loved, the beauty of being called on to love, and the beauty of what it means to be human; the beauty of living amid the beauty of our planet in its remaking. Beauty is transformative. We are changed in the perceiving of it and in the making of it....and the world is changed too. The world is changed by beauty made outward and visible. To experience the beautiful changes everything.

As the people working for beauty, we, liturgists extraordinaire, the people of faith and conscience, are world changers, world makers..that is our sole vocation:... enacting, embodying beauty in its infinite unfolding...music and art and nature, outward and visible signs of how we are made, how the world is made...the truth of the matter... the presence of evil notwithstanding. Our Church Liturgy at its best should celebrate and point to how the created order is rightly made; that it is imagination that turns the spheres, the creation dancing into being to a song....and the song's lyrics include something about a meal graciously served; something about taking care of the least of us; something about kindness and mercy and justice and sacrifice and dignity, standing in the face of the not-rightness in our world...and the whole of it still, all beautiful, dynamic, unfolding ever as we speak... a sacred entanglement in the labors of new birth.

In the beginning God looked at all of what God had made and called it beautiful; and as God continues God's own liturgical vocation of singing the world into being, bearing beauty from the source, beauty that is the source, we dear people of the Work of the Way are implied profoundly, and that is a beautiful thing.

Of Spirit and Advocacy

We are now in the season after Pentecost, the season of the Spirit, that enigmatic third person of the Trinity. In Luke the Spirit shows up fifty days after the Resurrection. In John the Spirit shows up Easter evening. But in truth the Spirit is forever on the move. For Israel in the first century the Spirit had grown silent during the brutal occupation of Rome. At Jesus' resurrection the Spirit for the early Jewish Christians returns empowering their communities for the way ahead. John names the Spirit the Advocate. So for us the modern day spirit-filled, we are to live lives of passionate advocacy.

The theme of this year's General Convention is Ubuntu, which is a Zulu word that means I in you and you in me. It is a word that calls for intentional community, that we live not for ourselves, but that we live for the good of the whole, something quite counter cultural in the west. Ubuntu is the life of the Spirit, that we become advocates for our brother and sister; that our well being is intimately connected to the well being of the other. We become Advocates for the voiceless of our world, advocates for mercy and compassion; advocates for peace and nonviolence; advocates for justice and dignity. Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit is the very revelation of our vocation, what we are made for: that we live as the community of faith as the Advocate, the incarnation of the Spirit, given to a world in want of saving breath.

This is the same Spirit that moved over the deep in the very beginning, the life force, both matter and energy, wind from the stars, that creates and recreates our world to the tune of an ancient and sacred song. In the Spirit we are co creators with God, we in God and God in us, reconciling the world into the gracious commonweal, that God imagines; we the bearers of God's imaginative Spirit that lives so that all may live in the new creation that comes as a song in the wind in every act of advocacy for the least of us. We saw in the flesh this Sunday past what the Spirit can do: The Kuot family now has a home all their own through the power of the Spirit...they in us and we in them... Spirit alive and real. The Spirit is no ghost, but flesh and blood, bringing dignity to the beloved of God's world, and we have proof, do we not?

Of Knowing Ignorance and Ignorant Knowledge

Mary Robert and I just attended the Spring Clergy conference of our diocese. Dr. Catherine Keller, process theologian extraordinaire was our presenter. In her opening lecture she spoke of two modalities of knowing having to do with knowing self, knowing one's environment and knowing God. The first mode of knowing she calls knowing ignorance. This is the vast field of what we don't know, that infinite horizon of truth that we approach with great reverence and humility. This is the luminous infinite field of knowledge that calls us into new revelation and into truth told anew...ever illusive and ever present...ever unfolding from its hiddenness, offering truth speaking, singing the world into being... new paradigms, new things and ways. This is the enlightening presence of mystery that draws, beguiles seeker and mystic and pilgrim like bees to honey...It requires diligent relationality, humility, persistence and courage. It is an intimate process that is life long and perhaps beyond...It requires strength of the imagination...and will surely surprise and awe.

The second mode of knowledge she calls ignorant knowledge. This is a dogmatic ideological fixed set of beliefs that eschews process, openness and possibility...a willful ignorance as it were. This type of knowing insists on its own way...and scapegoats that which threatens its self sufficiency and certainty. It is the mode of knowledge that on an institutional level gets us into wars. It is ignorant knowledge that has perpetuated global warming up and against a decided agreement in the scientific community on the causes of climate change. Rush Limbaugh, and bigotry in its myriad manifestations, icons of ignorant knowledge.

We must live into our mystic tendencies as people of God; we must embrace the beautiful potential of the great unknown that wants more than all things to be known intimately. It is God's way, is it not, that to truly know, one must go the way of unknowing, as T.S. Eliot puts it. To know the light, one must embrace the glowing dark. There seems to be an emerging trend these days among the world of nations that embraces the art of collaboration...an institutional modus operandi of respecting what we don't know about each other, and therefore being open to knowing more truly each other...a new relational way of solving problems and creating collaborative potential...a way of humble and respectful knowing of things hidden before...an artful and gracious process of becoming the sacred Commonweal God intends for all people in all places. Perhaps as humankind we have begun in earnest to embrace our knowing ignorance.

Seek, O pilgrim, the great unknown, that luminous other that calls to us from just nearby...and you will begin to know, face to face, God's own knowledge of a paradise here and now, that will enlighten, to the utter surprise and joy of all, the universe, in all her infinite beauty, entire.

Of God's Greening Love

I received something of a cryptic E-mail a few days ago. At first it looked like spam, but the sender's name was vaguely familiar, so I opened it. It was titled something like "in praise of God's greening love," and it went on to talk about the advent of spring, and the new gardens all around, and the renewing of the earth. It was a little too sentimental for my taste, or as my sons would say, cheesy, but I've not been able to get it off my mind.

It is told that once St. Francis of Assisi was asked what he would do if he knew for sure that the end of the world was imminent. His answer was that he would keep on hoeing his garden. We are the gardeners of Eden. We live in a paradise not lost, a theology the church likes to foist upon us, but in a marvelous paradise in which we are created to enable and participate in the greening, the restoring of it, from year to year, from season to season. K, to the curiosity of our incredulous neighbors, has dug up the grass in our front yard and planted a parterre vegetable garden...now at the center of our comings and goings...and we see from day to day its greening...its germinating potential...the hope it engenders...a living and apt metaphor for who God is and what God does. God is all about greening, setting life loose, making hope alive.

Our God hoes the garden, God's life and labor, bringing forever and always, new life. We know, if we but pay attention to the signs of nature around us, that God forever and always comes to us amid the cold barrenness of winter, bringing green shoots from the earth which will renew and sustain the life force, our souls as natural as the plants of a garden, raised, renewed, a new germination towards hope and love and life. So we never despair...for even in our dark winters...God is forever greening. God's greening life is the one life and light we forever share in profound intimacy, and life which we forever bear to our world with artful gardeners' hands. Get hoeing gardeners for winter is past and it is for us, God's sons and daughters, heirs of the garden, to bring life and life abundant.

On meeting St. Catherine of Siena just this morning

Today is the feast day of Catherine of Siena. The Mass at noon today was in her honor. She lived in the Tuscan city of Siena in the late fourteenth century. At age five it is told that she had a vision of the great martyrs in the heavenly courts all at the right hand of God. This vision among many others were so poignant for Catherine that she wished to dedicate her entire life to Christian service. She was one of twenty five children. It was not uncommon to have many children in those days because of the persistent death toll of the Black Plague which terrorized all of Europe. She learned to read and write, and wrote many letters to priests and bishops exhorting them to a proper Christian life of service, challenging the abuses of the institutional church. The town of Siena was divided as to whether she was a mystic or a fanatic. Perhaps the two are close kin.

Catherine became a member of the Dominican order and gave her life to helping the sick and dying. Legend goes that God offered her the stigmata, the wounds of the crucified Christ, but she refused declaring her unworthiness; that her joy found in her work was her just reward. She died from exhaustion at the age of thirty three.

I met her quite by surprise this morning early. I was at a hospital visiting a parishioner. The family and I were waiting outside the patient's room, and this patient was requiring around the clock nursing care. The nurse came out into the hall, and one of the family members said to her, "Gosh you are really earning your paycheck this week." To which this tall, dark-skinned, wise-eyed soul said, her eyes profound and fixed on ours, "I thank God for this work every single day!"

Here is one who has given herself to a vocation that many won't or can't do. She has learned the secret that in God's economy we find joy and purpose and life at the margins of our world...where there is disease and death...where there is poverty and indignity...where there is violence and injustice...There we meet the Christ and the response, the reward is joy. I looked at her hands and saw the hope of our world just there...hands which offer themselves in loving sacrifice, recreating once again, and each day, the universe. I didn't have to ask her name; I already knew, and I thought to myself, I hope she gets her rest, for we will need her for far longer than thirty three years. Blessed Catherine pray for us.

Of Improvisation and Particularity

I write here in Austin Texas at the library of the Seminary of the Southwest. It is about seventy degrees outside at about 20% humidity. We don't know about twenty percent humidity in Mobile. My sinuses are confused. There's not a cloud in the sky and around noon we took a drive into the Texas countryside mainly in search of barbecue brisket...but also the landscape: random breaks of wind tossed mesquite; siverado sage; cacti in full bloom... red, yellow and orange....old native cemeteries along this ancient trade route etched among the sandstone trap rock...there a grotto carved into the rugged landscape with the figure of the Virgin of Guadeloupe inside....She the God of Mexico then and now, long before the white man God...Mexico, the name of this very land just some one hundred and seventy years ago.... Then, the Mexican Hat, Indian paintbrush...bluebonnets in and among the roadside culverts would have been called by very different names.

None of these species of plants flourishing along the way could even survive in the climate of Mobile just six hundred miles away at roughly the same latitude. If one wanted to bring camellias, sasanquas, hydrangea, ginger lilies; bananas; elephant ear to central Texas...the things that grow without effort for us...one would be sorely disappointed...they would wither and cease to exist. Both out of context.

Life adapts to the particular; Life forever an improvisational enterprise....setting its roots taking into account the context of its engendering. The life force forever mindful, conscious of the incomprehensible iterations in time and space of the particular beauty that shapes its improbable destiny...a destiny not pre-ordained but still becoming in mystery, in particular contexts...not as a sweeping universal reality....but a reality intimate and close and particular...the end of things in this particular becoming always a speculation about which God Godself can only wonder and marvel and dream and hope.

Resurrection is the name, within our particular religious and cultural and socio-economic heritage, that we give to this life force that forever renews itself within the most improbable circumstances....this is the life force that in every particular cultural and socio-economic context, every corner of human community, brings dignity and mercy and justice and nonviolence and new hope by whatever name it is given....Its gods have many names around the world...the Virgin of Guadeloupe, she the earth mother...Krishna, the go between of earth and heaven...the Tao in its enlightening aesthetic....different manifestations according to the particular milieu, that is its own fertile soil...the matrix within which truth and life may flourish... myriad means of redemption...but still wherever there is dignity brought to bear...wherever justice and kindness... wherever sacrifice for the greater good...there is life and life abundant, and the world, in one particular at a time, is raised into its fullness....life always improvising a way...being always engendered anew....by any faith...by any name....but for us, in our particularity: Christ is risen and in our significant soil...all is made alive.

Of the Holy Cross

At one time I had a Celtic cross that I wore around my neck, just for two or three years or so. I remember a college friend asked me that if Jesus had been killed by firing squad, would I then wear a gun around my neck...or an electric chair, or a guillotine or a hangman's noose...I found the question disturbing and distasteful; but over the years it's a point well taken. Crucifixion was the punishment practiced by the Roman Empire for seditionists...enemies of the state. It was a particularly gruesome way to die, because it was meant to be observed by the public as a deterrent, lest anyone else got any rebellious ideas. It was terribly painful and the onset of death was a slow asphyxiation as the lungs gradually filled with fluid....and crucifixions occurred outside the walls of the city meant to shame the victim and the victim's family...It was dehumanizing to say the least.

The saving act of God for the world was not this demeaning and shameful death of God's son; but that as the raised community of the faithful, and the goodness that we bear as followers, imitators of Jesus...the saving truth is that this goodness can stand against and even overcome such shame and brutality... and must... We stand with our God in a solidarity of non-violence, peace and justice. This goodness, which is the kingdom of God in its very becoming, will transform the brutality and dispossession and shame that surely abounds. Salvation then is living the faith passionately serving the other. The crosses we wear around our necks this Holy Week, whether figuratively or literally, are the outward and visible signs that violence and injustice are ever present....and it is ours to stand against them no matter the cost...It is what we are made for...to make Holy the cross wherever we come upon it.

And let us remember all the crucified...all the shamed and victimized...We as the body of Christ are a living, life giving sacrifice for them...We who are resurrection life...life called forth out of the very darkness itself for the world's transformation...life that is borne by all of us who stand at the empty tomb...life that raises the world's dead...Resurrection life is Jesus' legacy for the church and all people of conscience...and that life is ours to share, for it is real and it is alive, and it will change the world...and it will transform the brutality of the cross into a profound and resilient joy.

The Passion of the Christ

During my last year of seminary Mel Gibson's movie the Passion of the Christ was released about this time of year, right around Holy Week. I had read reviews and I knew I probably wouldn't like it, but I felt if I were going to critique its theology, it would probably be good form if I saw it. So I went by myself...just me and a few others scattered in the theater.

The movie began with a techno-Arabic/Hebrew/Semitic musical score...an eerie otherworldly chanting the backdrop for one of the most gory movies I've ever seen...slow motion torture in strobe-like rhythm...and more blood than one can imagine...I left after about thirty minutes; and I thought about the pervading theology of the Passion, the crucifixion of Jesus, in our western culture: the theology of Substitution, that goes something like this: God loved us so much in spite of our innumerable sins as humankind that he sent his son to be tortured and killed to pay the penalty for all of us; Jesus' death the ransom for all of our sins so that we may have eternal life...What kind of God would that be? As I left the theater whatever remnant of atonement theology still around in my consciousness, I left there in the seething dark.

God does not require blood. The crucifixion in the Gospels is an unveiling of the brutality of power gone wrong...an unveiling of imperial injustice...the murder of an innocent man. God does not require blood. God requires passion for our world...Jesus the model...Jesus the archetype. Jesus and the community that followed Jesus cared so much for their world, cared so much for changing the world for the better, cared so much about calling out the injustice that beset them... that it got them in trouble, got many of them killed...So the theology rightly goes like this: God so loves the world that God calls all people of conscience, as God called the Christ, to love passionately their world even if it means risking one's life...That we live solely for our sister...that we live solely for our brother...that we live as God lives...in an utter predisposition of sacrifice....sacrifice that saves; sacrifice that brings eternal life in earth...eternal life meaning living in the presence of God here and now... not in some otherworldly supernatural existence...but living our lives as they are truly and forever meant to be...to live in the presence of God is to be fully human...fully human like the Christ....fully human...passionate for our world.

Like our brother come before us, we are called to go with Passion into the Jerusalems of our world...into the places of indignity and dispossession, loving our neighbor, which we are told is the same as loving God...let us go not counting the cost whatever that cost may be....then will the sin of the world be cast off...we, the people of passion, the living atonement of the created order....At our coming then will even the rocks and stones cry hosanna in the highest...blessed be the coming of the Lord.... at last.

Of Salvation and Dignity

Mary Robert and I received the J. Allen Pope Reaching Out award this past Saturday evening. The award is given by AQUA, an organization comprised of the various organizations and agencies that serve the gay, lesbian and transgendered community in Mobile. It was a bigger deal than I thought; incredible energy and enthusiasm in the room; and I realized that the award was more about All Saints than it was about Mary and me. It is the people of All Saints, who as a matter of practice, continually reach out, claim and include those who in some way or another have found themselves excluded. This reaching out here goes far beyond the LGBT community; we reach out to displaced refugees, the poor and the hungry, the battered and the disenfranchised of our world.

In accepting the award I said to the assembly gathered that we church folk have a lot of fancy words we have been using over the centuries of our several and disparate denominations, to the extent that many of our so-called church words have lost their meaning. One such word I suggested is "salvation." What does that word mean beyond a Christian platitude? We hear it so often. I remember in high school other kids asking me if I were saved...."Jesus saves" bumper stickers...salvation in our culture a decided means of exclusion...either you're in or your out....Augustine of Hippo thought as much...only a few denizens in the city of God...while the doomed burgeoning city of the world falls off the cosmic stage as ballast....Calvin derived most of his theology from Augustine...and alas this exclusionary predisposition of Christianity is still pervasive.

Ishmael Garcia noted theologian and ethicist argues that salvation is not some elite rank of which one is a member...a somewhat private guarantee of a blissful life after death, to the exclusion of others....He argues that salvation is a present reality that has a decided face, and that face is dignity. Wherever dignity is made present there God's saving love is made manifest...therefore salvation is for all...everyone on this planet is intended by God to live a dignified life...Another way to say the line from our Baptismal Covenant is: "to respect the salvation of every human being...the notion of salvation then takes on a very practical reality, instead of some overused abstract platitude. Salvation then becomes a practice...a practice of making the lives of the least in our world better....the practice of salvation now the means by which all people live in the light of God's gracious favor; in God's abundant kingdom.....our high call is to bear God's dignity to the world....feeding the hungry; providing clean water, medical care...through advocacy within the structures of our political and socio-economic world to enable for all people, God's children, a better way of living...Salvation not a badge but enlightened practice....a practice with implications both material and spiritual...of the same cloth....the ancient world never separated the two.

We are learning the art of salvation here....I think and hope we are... It is why we are here in the first place, not for ourselves alone but for those who are given to us....we are being sent, as we speak, into the dark corners of the indignity in our world, we, as followers of Christ, bearing the face of salvation....inviting all to God's table...no one left out....the city of God and the city of the world one shining city in which there is dignity enough...room at the table enough...and all will see salvation face to face, together.

Simply Salvation

I don't watch a lot of television; just sporting events, Jon Stewart on the Daily Show when I can catch him, and Food T.V. I've given up on real journalism. It's all entertainment sound-bites now; and don't even get me started on the so-called reality shows. But lately I've been watching a show on the Travel Channel called No Reservations featuring Anthony Bordain, a chain smoking, irreverent gourmand who travels the world exploring food and culture. Last night featured Vietnam...thin crepes, the process learned about during the French occupation, but adapted to the fresh ingredients that are the hallmark of Vietnamese cuisine...crepes stuffed with alfalfa sprouts, leeks, hot peppers, fish sauce, lemon grass and shrimp....simple and profound.

Bordain's premise, not just on this particular segment, but in most of these broadcasts, is that to know the true beauty of the cuisine of a culture, one must taste the food of the poor...the cuisine of the common people...tried and true cooking that sustains a way of life...the tried and true cooking that informs and underpins the haute cuisine of every culture...The last segment of this show was set in a farm house outside of Saigon...the entire extended family, three generations were there at table...all of the meal served was produced on the farm, cooked over a wood fire in a wok that had served the family for several hundred years...peas stir fried with red peppers and garlic...roasted corn with lemon....a pork braise in a rich vegetable stock, pineapple to sweeten...simple and profound...and the meal graciously shared....a holy moment...as in every shared meal...mundane, meagre ingredients marvelously transformed into food for life, nurture for the way ahead. A profound moment of renewal born of the most common things of earth....a reality, an innate gnosis, knowledge that has been carried down throughout the evolution of the created order. It is no accident that the principal Rite of the church is a meal....forever a principal act of worship long before Christianity.

The metaphor for me here is that salvation begins on the common and mundane margins of our world...at the core of our common life...a world wherein despite meagre means, hospitality is the rule of living...that God's gracious abundance is quite paradoxically found where there seemingly is none. In the economy of God it is sacrifice that multiplies the loaves. In every act of sacrifice God's love and nurture are set loose exponentially. A rudimentary meal transformed into the food of the gods bearing quite literally new life....We would learn well to simplify....to value our meals as sacred....to graciously share...to invite the guest....these are rudiments of the kingdom...come close...and simple as a plot of vegetables...at the next shared taste....something to marvel....something to praise.

Of Faith and Fasting

Thou hast neither youth nor age

But as it were an after dinner sleep

Dreaming of both

from Eliot's Gerontion

I've never been one to fast during Lent. I remember once or twice I gave up chocolate, or potato chips, but that was no big deal, just a fairly simple means to chalk up a brownie point or two with God. It seemed sufficient that I knew people or had friends who fasted. This Lent, however, I've decided to fast...very little meat, light meals, very little carbs or fat...water instead of soda....sparkling water instead of wine. We were out walking the other afternoon and stopped into a coffee shop. I found myself staring at the Philly Cheese hot dog advertisement, mesmerized: sauteed peppers and onions, melted fontina cheese, pork sausage, toasted bun, grainy mustard....but I digress.

I've stayed hungry for the past week, living expectantly for each meager meal, still waiting for the payoff on the scales.... but I have discovered something else: my mind is more active, dreams more poignant; my soul is stirred. I've been reading a lot more lately....Just the other night I couldn't really get to sleep (hunger will do that) and I found myself immersed in memories that flooded into my consciousness in a luxurious and gentle reverie...I arranged them in terms of my school grades...Mrs. Camp my first grade teacher, Kathy Bennett gave me a Christmas present....Kennedy shot, dead and buried in the second....Mrs. Baxter grieving for her husband in the third, long division, Ulysses lost at sea, I loved Penelope too...Allen Jones' wit, seventh, spin the bottle, Jane returned the locket, tears... basketball in the ninth, Shamrock milkshakes, Abbey Road....growing pains in the tenth, Latin, the smell of lantana at the beach, a salty sea breeze...college, Yeats discussed at the truck stop.....marriage and children...beloved pets departed....of wheeling seasons...bitter sweet our lives.....love and loss...hope and grief....joy and disappointment....boredom and poignancy.....my life a never ending succession of unlikely occasions...never happening the way I had thought...joy and regret of the same fabric, of the same song.....the memories so real and so close now it seems.

Now is the time in the "juvescence" of the year, as Eliot puts it....now is the time to take stock, to take account....to gather up the fragments of our lives and hold them gently and with reverence, because these shards of our existence, these memories, no less real than the present moment, are sacred...not just some of them, but all of them....our lives universes unto themselves and intimate rudiments of the universe entire...redeemed by water and Spirit. Nothing is lost...nothing of no use... nothing without meaning...A holy hope manifest among the broken pieces that all manner of thing will be well.....A hope that already sets its roots in the present surely...if we but pay attention.

However you choose to do it...take account....pay attention...glean the soul...live expectantly...the time is nigh and the kingdom of God is at hand, God's kingdom that seeks every time and place, God's bitter sweet kingdom that even inhabits our memories...Prepare the way of the Lord....a way upon which we all, memories and all, are profoundly implied.