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.