All Saints and All Priests

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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.