Imagine

Imagine Has Moved

2010-02-02T13:41:00.001-06:00

We have redesigned the All Saints website, so my blog has been moved to http://allsaintsmobile.net/blog/

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Of Knowing and Doing

2010-01-26T11:55:00.003-06:00

To know what love is one must be about loving; to know what good is, one must do goodness. I learned about that again this morning. I just served as a panelist along with several L'Arche core and team members in a conversation with some Birmingham Southern students who have chosen for their January term project observing and learning about intentional communities; what they have termed neo-monastic communities. They first visited a Benedictine community in north Alabama; then the Koinonia community in Americus Georgia, and now L'Arche Mobile their last stop. L'Arche, for those of you who don't yet know about it, is a residential community that serves people with mental disabilities. People, if it weren't for L'Arche, who would be institutionalized. They reside together, take their meals together, share household chores,worship together, share sorrow and joy and the stuff of life, just like the rest of us.

Each team member (the paid staff) of L'arche without exception said that they stay at L'Arche for far different reasons from those for which they came. One woman said she came because she simply needed a job, but that now she stays because through her caring for these "least" souls, these who are considered marginal in our world, she is learning not only how to love unconditionally her friends and family through an acquired new perspective; but she is learning also how to love herself. She said that once she almost left because of the deaths of two core residents whom she'd grown to adore, but that she stayed because she had learned that love was in truth stronger than death. Another team member informed the students that living in this community is not all sweetness and pious hymn singing, but that there are flashing moments of anger and resentment, just like with the rest of us. But she said that those moments don't last long because they work hard at communicating their differences with the goal of reconciliation. A student asked, "and you pull that off consistently?" "We have to", she said, "or else we wouldn't last as a community." She said that she came to L'Arche because of a vague calling that she wanted to serve something larger than herself. Now she says that she stays because she is learning that love is real; that God is not invisible but alive in all of us created in God's image. These weren't canned phrases...but words learned and spoken from experience.

Over my years here, I've been learning from L'Arche too. I've learned that seeing to the good of our neighbor is the highest form of love, love that brings joy and love that transforms. The L'Arche community is a model, with all its flaws and messiness, for all to see, that we can't live with integrity and dignity except in community, a community that cares first for the other, that the needs of each matter equally.... a community that forgives as vital necessity; a community that, in spite of its fragility, becomes invincible through love...That is who God is...and that is who we all are...creatures both human and divine, made to give only...to love only for the world's transformation and renewal....and to live such a life is to know joy that is visible...to do love is to know love....to know God alive among us, ...Let us get about the work of enlightened loving, for there we will surely see the God of Love.... see and know in our own time and own place....We have to, else we won't last.

Of Medium and Message

2010-01-19T10:38:00.004-06:00

In 1967 Marshall McLuhan coined the term, "the medium is the message." McLuhan was a professor of English Literature, critic and scholar, but much of his life's work had to do with the study of how we communicate in the context of a post-modern multi media world. He also coined the term, "global Village" recognizing that, even as early as the 1960's, electronic multi-media would begin bridging the socio-economic and cultural gaps in our world. He developed this theory well before computers as we now know them existed; before e-mail; Facebook; Twitter; digital video; and digital cellular and satellite communications. McLuhan's primary hypothesis concerning media was that the message that is communicated is profoundly affected by the means by which it is communicated....We know, for example, that e-mails may be understood quite differently as compared to a spoken conversation; remote live video communicates far differently compared to still photographs; poetry different from prose. The medium is the message.

I have marveled at the television media's coverage of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. I must say that I have a broad ambivalence regarding the so-called news media, but in this case things seem somehow different. A young doctor was seen on camera weeping at the magnitude of his task ahead. He told NBC's Nancy Sniderman that this event had changed his life forever. She asked him if he thought he would be able to continue...He replied that he would stay until all was done...We saw a young surgeon telling a mother that her six year old daughter's leg must be amputated or else she would die....the mother wailed, tears streaming down her face of ebony, but was soon consoled by her injured daughter, her husband and this young surgeon from Raleigh North Carolina...similar tears on her white face; then we saw a woman who had been trapped in rubble for six days, her husband keeping vigil until he heard her small voice...three hours later she was rescued by fire-fighters from Los Angeles...as she lay on the gurney, she sang hymns of praise; another NBC reporter who lived thirteen years in Haiti as a child tracked down her nurse to make sure she was alive....both were unable to speak upon finding each other.

The medium is the message. Where the medium is compassion, then the message is God's love incarnate...alive and real....by air and land and sea...and this love ramifies throughout the global village, the commonweal of humankind, in which we now see and hear and know of our astounding and irrevocable interdependence...we have seen it in the flesh....and we will continue to see it, this intimacy of the global human community, in all aspects of our lives...our lives that shape and are shaped by many other lives...Our tears this day, our common ground and our shared humanity....Where there is compassion, even in the midst of unthinkable tragedy, there is God's love. The medium: compassion; the message: Love alive.

Of Death, Life and Water

2010-01-12T11:15:00.002-06:00

K got up early with the puppy this past Saturday morning. I heard a portentous moan from the kitchen....We have no hot water, the voice said....(we were told that hot water pipes freeze first because they are smaller...I have no idea if that's true or not) The outside thermometer read twenty degrees. By early afternoon the cold water pressure dropped to a trickle...I could hear water running under the house....sure enough a pipe had burst....We cut off the water at the street, called two different plumbers, and waited wondering about how and why our life had taken this not so pleasant turn.

Life and death, and the entire cosmic order for that matter depend so much on the elemental...the mysteriously mundane basics...water, a simple and basic compound...two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen...simple, mundane, basic.... we will die without it...life in any form, as far as we know, can't exist without it...and water can be our undoing....the sailor swallowed by the deep...the unreckonable floods of Atlantic hurricanes... "full fathom five your father lies." death and the inevitable rebirth, the creative artistry of water....shaping canyons and glaciers...bringing the new....over eons and in a moment.

Water has always been a powerful symbol in the human religious psyche...the earliest religions we know of practiced water rites...holding up as holy this unpredictable element...life bearer and death bringer...We say in our own water Rite...that in it we are dead to the world of sin, shame and indignity...and in it, alive as well, transformed for the way ahead...empowered and emboldened for the good of the whole...a sea change for the soul.... Water the mystic means of the death and life cycle...the universe cycling towards its marvelous completion to the tune and rhythm of H2O.

Water is both grave and womb....we are forever in and of that knowledge...and we must trust that knowledge and love it as well....for it speaks of a profound reality that holds the secret...a secret that has everything to do with life and death and love and hope...and at last, quite elementary.

Of Birth in the Dark

2010-01-05T10:45:00.002-06:00

I was standing in the foyer of the church office just before the five thirty Christmas Eve service when the bottom dropped out. The front line of severe weather had arrived as predicted... as if on cue. Frenzied sheets of rain hurried through the already flooding parking lot; umbrellas were turned inside out by the wind; people bent under coats were scrambling for shelter, soaked in just seconds....and then it happened...BAM....a bright apocalyptic flash...and then darkness....for a moment the lights flickered in a paltry last gasp...and in a shower of sparks the transformer affixed to the pole in the parking lot gave up its ghost; and all manner of thing was dark..... and what made it worse was that all the surrounding buildings in our neighborhood had power.... a good sign or a bad one, I wondered.

I didn't have time for an argument with God, and as we all scrambled for candles, it crossed my mind that for almost two thousand years the church survived without electricity... so we would make do....and we did...We prayed, we sang a cappella....we greeted each other in the name of the one born among us...and together we ate and drank of a holy meal... And as people were leaving the church, phantoms in the wavering candlelight, a parishioner's face appeared floating in front of me, and he said, "Christmas comes anyway." Indeed it does I thought. This birth comes with all inevitability despite all that would prevent it...despite the windswept dark of chaos...This new life insists and persists, so that light will forever come again to inform the unruly dark.

We can trust such a birth...that amid every dark night, the light breaks upon it...at every moment of despair and trouble in our lives, amid the crisis moments which inevitably find us, the truth of the matter is that light comes surely and decisively...that we will never be left without hope. The dark is not the enemy...it is our fear of it that is...The dark is gracious contrast to the truth of the human condition, the light-truth, that we are never left to languish in the dark of nothingness...that the light insists and persists, as does each and every birth....God's Spirit moves as light once more over the face of the deep, graciously and generously ordering and creating the world entire...as certain as the dawn follows the dark of night...So fear not and celebrate this light-truth... this marvelous birth...the light birth...the love birth...For this is all we know of God for sure...and all we need to know.

Of Darkness and Deliverance

2009-12-15T10:17:00.002-06:00

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

2009-12-01T11:06:00.003-06:00

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

2009-11-24T10:04:00.003-06:00

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

2009-11-18T13:49:00.007-06:00

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

2009-11-10T10:57:00.002-06:00

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

2009-11-03T11:05:00.002-06:00

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

2009-10-27T11:10:00.002-05:00

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

2009-10-20T10:50:00.002-05:00

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

2009-10-13T10:47:00.003-05:00

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

2009-10-06T11:59:00.003-05:00

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

2009-09-29T11:22:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-22T11:00:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-15T11:15:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-09T10:36:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-01T10:42:00.002-05:00

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

2009-08-26T10:42:00.002-05:00

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

2009-08-18T10:46:00.002-05:00

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

2009-08-11T10:22:00.002-05:00

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'

2009-07-28T11:21:00.002-05:00

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

2009-07-12T09:58:00.010-05:00

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

2009-07-08T15:05:00.005-05:00

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

2009-06-30T10:35:00.003-05:00

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

2009-06-23T10:34:00.002-05:00

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

2009-06-15T14:03:00.003-05:00

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

2009-06-09T11:22:00.003-05:00

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

2009-06-02T10:58:00.003-05:00

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

2009-05-19T10:34:00.002-05:00

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

2009-05-05T10:51:00.002-05:00

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

2009-04-29T15:00:00.004-05:00

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

2009-04-20T15:06:00.003-05:00

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

2009-04-07T11:09:00.003-05:00

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

2009-04-01T08:45:00.003-05:00

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

2009-03-17T10:21:00.002-05:00

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

2009-03-10T10:39:00.004-05:00

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

2009-03-03T11:02:00.005-06:00

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.

Of Dust and Ash

2009-02-25T11:12:00.004-06:00

I walked out the front door this morning, Ash Wednesday, to last night's flotsam: strings of broken beads, a half eaten funnel cake just there in the middle of the street, cast off paper products everywhere, tottering in the morning breeze; an askew port-o-let down on a dead corner, that just last night was painted in neon. The trumpet blasts fallen silent. Artifacts of the lifeless."I hadn't thought death had undone so many," the protagonist laments to Virgil upon his entrance into the Infierno. Finally, it is all ash and dust, broken pieces of life lived and cast aside. A carbon chain and water we, the stuff of stars, who live for a day, and strain against the wind, and then are gone in a moment.

What word is to be found when the curtain is pulled aside and there is the truth of the matter before us? What word will suffice to shore up our ruin? What word will stand amid a world that passes away? Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return... What shall we say; what shall we ever say. O mortal what does our God require of us but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God. Love begets beauty. I'm sure of it. Living for the other engenders life there amid the ashes...Among the broken pieces of reality life stirs anew...the dead rising to new life in every act of sacrifice for the good of the whole. In every act of sacrifice the beauty of being made in the image of God is engendered. Life bearers we, sent among the dust and ash bearing the universe towards her perfection in every act of sacrifice, raising the dead into a profound renewal.

Sacrifice is the word we live, the word that orders all creation and we made in it. A beauty that will be all in all, and will be all the difference.

Of Parades and Paradise

2009-02-17T11:08:00.002-06:00

From my front porch I can see the gaudy lights of the food kiosk on Broad street...hawking funnel cakes....jumbo corn dogs...chicken on a stick..Do people really eat that stuff, and live to tell about it? Somewhere out in the night the drum corps is marking an ancient rhythm reminding us of some urgency at hand. The night is the time for a parade....the westward traveling stars above in rhythm ...The lights and music, and sounds of ardent voices, the laughter of children... bracing against the night...mocking the dark as it were...crying alleluia at the grave.

Now the first float rocks tenuously into view...the drums now louder...hands are raised in the moment...a moment that will soon pass...a moment of exultation...a garish apparition moving ghostlike among us...outward and visible warrant of the transience of life, of things and ways, mutable...of beauty and loss...of life and death...we are dust; and to dust we shall return....the rhythmic truth of the matter...the parade vanishes into the night as if it never were...Mardi Gras ends in ashes swept away by brooms and brushes.

Wallace Stevens says death is the mother of beauty. Indeed in these lengthening days we see new life germinating undeniably in the dead landscape....new life come again passing among us....we travelers passing along the way as well...It is in the journey, in the passing moment that beauty, the promised paradise lies. Raise your hands in honor of that which passes among us. Oh, don't ask what it is....you'll know it when you see it....and it comes with all urgency.

Of Faith and Facebook

2009-01-28T11:08:00.002-06:00

Yeah, I think I'm the last one on earth yet to join Facebook. All my friends have, everyone in the office. And they have all these friends. I thought I had friends, but alas, the cyber-truth of the matter is that I am virtually friendless without Facebook. K has recently joined and she has all these friends; she now knows when her niece in Greenville South Carolina purchases her vente from Starbucks. "Got my Starbucks...good to go," she chronicles. LOL I think. I was being recruited to join by one of the staff here, and I asked what if I joined and asked to be someone's friend and was rejected. "I couldn't bear that!" I said. "Oh they'll let you be their friend," she said with blithe confidence. My sons said K could be their friend, but warned her not to befriend their friends. What's that about?

In spite of Facebook being yet one more cultural and technological manifestation of our obsessive compulsive disposition, there is undeniably a palpable sense of community there amid the digital ether. K located and is in communication with a relative whom she hasn't seen since she was a child...she lives in California and is an Episcopalian...We're going to look her up when we are in California for the Episcopal General Convention...who knew? Our daughter has reconnected with high school friends. People in the know tell me there is even an All Saints group of friends in cyber space. OMG!

The life of faith at its heart is a life of befriending, the art of loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. The life of faith at its essence is, not an intellectual assent to a creed or a system of belief, but the artful practice of loving our neighbor, befriending the lonely and lost as we experience the joy of lively and imaginative community. We are so much stronger together; and it is God, Godself who inhabits every act of befriending. God thrives in community; and grieves for the friendless left out. To be befriended is to be granted dignity...dignity, the outward and visible sign of a God who loves only. Dignity the face of salvation. In all of our sacred befriending may we see God face to face....and amid friendship, know love come to light.

So, I'm asking ahead of time. If I dare to join Facebook, will you be my friend. Please.

Of Processions and Practice

2009-01-21T11:41:00.003-06:00

I watched a little of the inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral this morning chiefly to hear the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church deliver the closing prayer. The service was grand and ecumenical, not ecumenical just among Christian denominations, but among all faiths as well. The theme of the gathering, in the preaching, in the singing and in the prayers...was the central theme of all the great religions of the world: that the world as God sees it rightly lives amid a just peace; that we live compassionately including the least of us; that we always serve first the common good. Upon this enlightened practice of the faith, we, the interfaith community have much in common....and it is practice from which true theology and belief are born....ever evolving...always on a journey of making and remaking....If the faithful in every culture practice the faith; then theologies will converge.

And then there was the procession out of the church, a decided Episcopal touch; we know about processions: Processions are the outward and visible sign that we are on a journey; that we are not the same travelers once we take our leave; that life is forever about change and transformation....and we hold up this reality as beautiful....human nature on a journey towards its perfection...a paschal event, as it were, a sacred crossing over from what has grown old into what is becoming new... We live our lives in this process and we name it as beautiful along the way.

And the procession goes out into the world...the community of the faithful, the people of imaginative conscience bearing this transforming beauty into the world, for the world's transformation...all of us now, a compassionate commonweal bearing God's life and love for the world's sake; taking on new travelers, some improbable companions, in this mystical journey, this process of becoming....and the predisposition for this manner of journey is sacrifice... (every traveler knows that) a profound act of humility wherein we embrace the very truth of the universe that in order to love God we must love neighbor first. This is the Gospel truth that is shared by all people of faith...and we see it coming to fruition in the practice of the faith...theology and dogma will forever be mere speculation....It is enlightened practice that saves...and it begins again with every breath we take.

"Stony the road we trod..."

2009-01-14T11:19:00.003-06:00

Whether you voted red or blue this past election, there is no argument that this inauguration is one of poignant historic proportions. I was watching the Today show this morning and the soon to be official White House photographer was sharing some recent photos of the Obamas. I was struck with the image of the president elect with his two daughters in the Jefferson memorial; the three of them standing in front of this likeness of the American patriarch, founding father...white marble juxtaposed with brown skin. I realized that if the Obamas lived just two hundred and fifty years ago they quite likely would have been slaves....wives separated, sold at auction away from their husbands; parents separated from children; losing touch forever with family....a stony road indeed. I can't imagine what African Americans must be feeling now....joy, hope....liberation.

The entire sweep of Biblical narrative history, both Hebrew scripture and New Testament literature, is one long epic tale of God's vocation of liberation: the liberation of the people Israel from slavery in Egypt; the liberation from the Sinai desert sojourn; from the Philistine overlords; the liberation from the captivity in Babylon; from the oppressive Seleucids; liberation from Roman imperial indignity.....and liberation always begins on the margins, where it is most urgent; wherein it begins as renewal of community, the renewal of genuine human commerce. The way we have been forever meant to live. Community means that we forbear our differences in gracious hospitality; that we take care of our neighbor first; we feed and heal and clothe; the greater good being that which we serve; that violence will always be a lose/lose proposition....in short liberation always is engendered through sacrifice for the other.

All of us: the rich and the poor are in need of liberation; from that which binds our true creative predisposition, our true nature...self reliance is an illusion...our salvation is in community...the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It is the Gospel formula, as it were, that we live first for our neighbor, and the mystery is: That is where we find life abundant...and the abundant life is for all, not just a few.

It seems to me that both political parties find themselves in renewal...a reality that has settled upon us; I have such high hopes...I hope not naive, not just because of another step towards liberation for our African American brothers and sisters; but for the liberation of all of us; we are all contingent to each other...a greater mysterious human organism, a powerful collective which in truth is the very body of Christ; and living within which we know intuitively that until all are liberated, no one is free....but perhaps soon enough.

Of Faith and Childlikeness

2009-01-06T09:39:00.005-06:00

K and I were taking a walk late in the afternoon around the Episcopal Seminary campus in Austin last week, and we came upon two little girls who, outside their parents apartment in the driveway, had arranged a bed spread, pillows, stuffed animals, two dolls,a lamp, a table with a pitcher and two cups on it, two chairs beside; the worn chalky lines of an expired game of hop-scotch close by; the girls' hair long-escaped from the clasps and ribbons affixed by their mother earlier in the day. I asked them, "So girls, are you going to spend the night outside?" "Oh no sir," they said with youthful authority, "We are just playing." On the way home on Sunday morning several days later we were listening to the National Public Radio production called Speaking of Faith. I never get to hear this excellent broadcast because I am otherwise occupied Sunday mornings. The host, Krista Tippet, was interviewing the renowned child psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Coles about his vast experience studying the inner lives of children. What he had to say was astounding.

Children, he said, are far better models for us adults than we for them when it comes to spirituality. The older we get the more rational and rigid we become as we are conditioned by a culture that desperately seeks certainty. Children on the other hand are open to possibility; their imaginations always at the ready; and moreover, he said, children are passionate about discovery. They will go to great lengths and sometimes at great peril just to learn about the way of things; what things mean; why things are the way they are. Children are seekers par excellence. It is how we're all supposed to be.

All of us in the human family are created to make meaning of things. We are all discoverers. Our lives are predisposed to make meaning, not just for ourselves but for the sake of the world we serve. Jesus' counter cultural admonition to come into his fellowship as a child now takes on new meaning. We are as Christian folk to be about discovery, and that means we must be open to newness and possibility; we must be imaginative, ardent, courageous and passionate to seek to know and to share...the way children do. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...in seven joy filled days, God created them...to which God must surely say...I'm just playing.

Of Darkness and Light

2008-12-16T10:57:00.002-06:00

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

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

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

Of Singing and Significance

2008-12-09T10:10:00.003-06:00

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

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

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

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

Of Heaven's Advent

2008-12-02T10:00:00.003-06:00

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

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

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

Of Sacred Change

2008-11-25T11:47:00.004-06:00

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

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

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

Of Peril and Dignity

2008-11-11T10:07:00.004-06:00

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

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

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

Racism R.I.P.

2008-11-05T10:58:00.003-06:00

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

All Saints and All Priests

2008-10-28T10:17:00.004-05:00

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

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

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

Loving God and Loving Neighbor

2008-10-21T10:56:00.004-05:00

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

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

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

Of Faith and Worth

2008-10-14T10:57:00.004-05:00

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

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

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

Of God and Nature

2008-10-07T11:11:00.006-05:00

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

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

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

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

God the Universalist

2008-09-30T10:51:00.005-05:00

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

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

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

Of Death and Beauty

2008-09-20T16:11:00.004-05:00

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

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

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

Of Knowledge and Practice

2008-09-09T09:51:00.004-05:00

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

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

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

Of Dry Bones and New Life

2008-09-03T09:59:00.004-05:00

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

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

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

Of Holy Things and Holy People

2008-08-26T10:22:00.006-05:00

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

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

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

Of Faith and the Imagination

2008-08-19T10:11:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

Of Martyrs and Pilgrims

2008-08-12T11:30:00.006-05:00

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

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

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

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

Of Prayer and Hurricanes

2008-08-05T10:31:00.004-05:00

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

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

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

Church and the world: the Promise and the thing

2008-07-29T10:40:00.003-05:00

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

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

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

Who is God to you?

2008-07-22T10:47:00.008-05:00

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

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

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

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