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.