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.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
The Passion of the Christ
During my last year of seminary Mel Gibson's movie the Passion of the Christ was released about this time of year, right around Holy Week. I had read reviews and I knew I probably wouldn't like it, but I felt if I were going to critique its theology, it would probably be good form if I saw it. So I went by myself...just me and a few others scattered in the theater.
The movie began with a techno-Arabic/Hebrew/Semitic musical score...an eerie otherworldly chanting the backdrop for one of the most gory movies I've ever seen...slow motion torture in strobe-like rhythm...and more blood than one can imagine...I left after about thirty minutes; and I thought about the pervading theology of the Passion, the crucifixion of Jesus, in our western culture: the theology of Substitution, that goes something like this: God loved us so much in spite of our innumerable sins as humankind that he sent his son to be tortured and killed to pay the penalty for all of us; Jesus' death the ransom for all of our sins so that we may have eternal life...What kind of God would that be? As I left the theater whatever remnant of atonement theology still around in my consciousness, I left there in the seething dark.
God does not require blood. The crucifixion in the Gospels is an unveiling of the brutality of power gone wrong...an unveiling of imperial injustice...the murder of an innocent man. God does not require blood. God requires passion for our world...Jesus the model...Jesus the archetype. Jesus and the community that followed Jesus cared so much for their world, cared so much for changing the world for the better, cared so much about calling out the injustice that beset them... that it got them in trouble, got many of them killed...So the theology rightly goes like this: God so loves the world that God calls all people of conscience, as God called the Christ, to love passionately their world even if it means risking one's life...That we live solely for our sister...that we live solely for our brother...that we live as God lives...in an utter predisposition of sacrifice....sacrifice that saves; sacrifice that brings eternal life in earth...eternal life meaning living in the presence of God here and now... not in some otherworldly supernatural existence...but living our lives as they are truly and forever meant to be...to live in the presence of God is to be fully human...fully human like the Christ....fully human...passionate for our world.
Like our brother come before us, we are called to go with Passion into the Jerusalems of our world...into the places of indignity and dispossession, loving our neighbor, which we are told is the same as loving God...let us go not counting the cost whatever that cost may be....then will the sin of the world be cast off...we, the people of passion, the living atonement of the created order....At our coming then will even the rocks and stones cry hosanna in the highest...blessed be the coming of the Lord.... at last.
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.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Of Salvation and Dignity
Mary Robert and I received the J. Allen Pope Reaching Out award this past Saturday evening. The award is given by AQUA, an organization comprised of the various organizations and agencies that serve the gay, lesbian and transgendered community in Mobile. It was a bigger deal than I thought; incredible energy and enthusiasm in the room; and I realized that the award was more about All Saints than it was about Mary and me. It is the people of All Saints, who as a matter of practice, continually reach out, claim and include those who in some way or another have found themselves excluded. This reaching out here goes far beyond the LGBT community; we reach out to displaced refugees, the poor and the hungry, the battered and the disenfranchised of our world.
In accepting the award I said to the assembly gathered that we church folk have a lot of fancy words we have been using over the centuries of our several and disparate denominations, to the extent that many of our so-called church words have lost their meaning. One such word I suggested is "salvation." What does that word mean beyond a Christian platitude? We hear it so often. I remember in high school other kids asking me if I were saved...."Jesus saves" bumper stickers...salvation in our culture a decided means of exclusion...either you're in or your out....Augustine of Hippo thought as much...only a few denizens in the city of God...while the doomed burgeoning city of the world falls off the cosmic stage as ballast....Calvin derived most of his theology from Augustine...and alas this exclusionary predisposition of Christianity is still pervasive.
Ishmael Garcia noted theologian and ethicist argues that salvation is not some elite rank of which one is a member...a somewhat private guarantee of a blissful life after death, to the exclusion of others....He argues that salvation is a present reality that has a decided face, and that face is dignity. Wherever dignity is made present there God's saving love is made manifest...therefore salvation is for all...everyone on this planet is intended by God to live a dignified life...Another way to say the line from our Baptismal Covenant is: "to respect the salvation of every human being...the notion of salvation then takes on a very practical reality, instead of some overused abstract platitude. Salvation then becomes a practice...a practice of making the lives of the least in our world better....the practice of salvation now the means by which all people live in the light of God's gracious favor; in God's abundant kingdom.....our high call is to bear God's dignity to the world....feeding the hungry; providing clean water, medical care...through advocacy within the structures of our political and socio-economic world to enable for all people, God's children, a better way of living...Salvation not a badge but enlightened practice....a practice with implications both material and spiritual...of the same cloth....the ancient world never separated the two.
We are learning the art of salvation here....I think and hope we are... It is why we are here in the first place, not for ourselves alone but for those who are given to us....we are being sent, as we speak, into the dark corners of the indignity in our world, we, as followers of Christ, bearing the face of salvation....inviting all to God's table...no one left out....the city of God and the city of the world one shining city in which there is dignity enough...room at the table enough...and all will see salvation face to face, together.
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.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Simply Salvation
I don't watch a lot of television; just sporting events, Jon Stewart on the Daily Show when I can catch him, and Food T.V. I've given up on real journalism. It's all entertainment sound-bites now; and don't even get me started on the so-called reality shows. But lately I've been watching a show on the Travel Channel called No Reservations featuring Anthony Bordain, a chain smoking, irreverent gourmand who travels the world exploring food and culture. Last night featured Vietnam...thin crepes, the process learned about during the French occupation, but adapted to the fresh ingredients that are the hallmark of Vietnamese cuisine...crepes stuffed with alfalfa sprouts, leeks, hot peppers, fish sauce, lemon grass and shrimp....simple and profound.
Bordain's premise, not just on this particular segment, but in most of these broadcasts, is that to know the true beauty of the cuisine of a culture, one must taste the food of the poor...the cuisine of the common people...tried and true cooking that sustains a way of life...the tried and true cooking that informs and underpins the haute cuisine of every culture...The last segment of this show was set in a farm house outside of Saigon...the entire extended family, three generations were there at table...all of the meal served was produced on the farm, cooked over a wood fire in a wok that had served the family for several hundred years...peas stir fried with red peppers and garlic...roasted corn with lemon....a pork braise in a rich vegetable stock, pineapple to sweeten...simple and profound...and the meal graciously shared....a holy moment...as in every shared meal...mundane, meagre ingredients marvelously transformed into food for life, nurture for the way ahead. A profound moment of renewal born of the most common things of earth....a reality, an innate gnosis, knowledge that has been carried down throughout the evolution of the created order. It is no accident that the principal Rite of the church is a meal....forever a principal act of worship long before Christianity.
The metaphor for me here is that salvation begins on the common and mundane margins of our world...at the core of our common life...a world wherein despite meagre means, hospitality is the rule of living...that God's gracious abundance is quite paradoxically found where there seemingly is none. In the economy of God it is sacrifice that multiplies the loaves. In every act of sacrifice God's love and nurture are set loose exponentially. A rudimentary meal transformed into the food of the gods bearing quite literally new life....We would learn well to simplify....to value our meals as sacred....to graciously share...to invite the guest....these are rudiments of the kingdom...come close...and simple as a plot of vegetables...at the next shared taste....something to marvel....something to praise.
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.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Of Faith and Fasting
Thou hast neither youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both
from Eliot's Gerontion
I've never been one to fast during Lent. I remember once or twice I gave up chocolate, or potato chips, but that was no big deal, just a fairly simple means to chalk up a brownie point or two with God. It seemed sufficient that I knew people or had friends who fasted. This Lent, however, I've decided to fast...very little meat, light meals, very little carbs or fat...water instead of soda....sparkling water instead of wine. We were out walking the other afternoon and stopped into a coffee shop. I found myself staring at the Philly Cheese hot dog advertisement, mesmerized: sauteed peppers and onions, melted fontina cheese, pork sausage, toasted bun, grainy mustard....but I digress.
I've stayed hungry for the past week, living expectantly for each meager meal, still waiting for the payoff on the scales.... but I have discovered something else: my mind is more active, dreams more poignant; my soul is stirred. I've been reading a lot more lately....Just the other night I couldn't really get to sleep (hunger will do that) and I found myself immersed in memories that flooded into my consciousness in a luxurious and gentle reverie...I arranged them in terms of my school grades...Mrs. Camp my first grade teacher, Kathy Bennett gave me a Christmas present....Kennedy shot, dead and buried in the second....Mrs. Baxter grieving for her husband in the third, long division, Ulysses lost at sea, I loved Penelope too...Allen Jones' wit, seventh, spin the bottle, Jane returned the locket, tears... basketball in the ninth, Shamrock milkshakes, Abbey Road....growing pains in the tenth, Latin, the smell of lantana at the beach, a salty sea breeze...college, Yeats discussed at the truck stop.....marriage and children...beloved pets departed....of wheeling seasons...bitter sweet our lives.....love and loss...hope and grief....joy and disappointment....boredom and poignancy.....my life a never ending succession of unlikely occasions...never happening the way I had thought...joy and regret of the same fabric, of the same song.....the memories so real and so close now it seems.
Now is the time in the "juvescence" of the year, as Eliot puts it....now is the time to take stock, to take account....to gather up the fragments of our lives and hold them gently and with reverence, because these shards of our existence, these memories, no less real than the present moment, are sacred...not just some of them, but all of them....our lives universes unto themselves and intimate rudiments of the universe entire...redeemed by water and Spirit. Nothing is lost...nothing of no use... nothing without meaning...A holy hope manifest among the broken pieces that all manner of thing will be well.....A hope that already sets its roots in the present surely...if we but pay attention.
However you choose to do it...take account....pay attention...glean the soul...live expectantly...the time is nigh and the kingdom of God is at hand, God's kingdom that seeks every time and place, God's bitter sweet kingdom that even inhabits our memories...Prepare the way of the Lord....a way upon which we all, memories and all, are profoundly implied.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Of Dust and Ash
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Of Parades and Paradise
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.
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.
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